Most of his life, LeFleur had been a rule-follower. He’d done well in school, earned badges in scouts, scored high on his police tests. He’d even thought of leaving Montserrat for England to train as a constable. He was a good size for law enforcement, tall, broad-shouldered, with a thick mustache that hid his smile and made him appear quite serious.
But then he met Patrice. A New Year’s Eve party, fourteen years earlier, part of Montserrat’s annual festival that features parades, costumed performers, and a Calypso King competition. They danced. They drank. They danced some more. They kissed at midnight and tumbled passionately into the new year. They saw each other every day for the next few months, and there soon seemed little doubt they would marry.
By summer, they had. They purchased a small house, which they painted yellow, and bought a four-poster bed where they spent a great many hours. LeFleur would smile just watching Patrice walk away from the bed and smile even more watching her walk back. Forget England, he thought. He wasn’t going anywhere.
A few years later, he and Patrice had a child, Lilly, and they doted on her as new parents do, taking pictures of every move she made, teaching her nursery songs, carrying her on their shoulders for trips to the market. LeFleur painted their second bedroom a light-pink shade and added dozens of little pink stars on the ceiling. Under those stars, Jarty and Patrice put Lilly to bed every night. He remembered feeling so good during those days, it seemed undeserved, as if someone had accidentally given him a double share of 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.
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.