I attached it with a knot, gripped the paddle-like handle, cast the line over the side, and waited for hours. Nothing. But the next morning, early, I tried again, and this time was able to snag a small sunfish. I ate most of it, saved a little meat for bait, and with that bait was able to catch a dorado the next day, which I cut into pieces and cured on lines I strung from one end of the canopy to the other. It was primitive fishing, but the newfound sustenance gave me a sharper focus. I felt my brain reviving.
Since then, I have been able to build a small stock of fish and potable water. My greatest foe has been loneliness, but with Alice alongside, I held that at bay. We spoke about many things. Yet deep down, I knew I was withholding the truth of my role in the Galaxy’s demise, just as I have been withholding it from you. I know it makes no sense, lying to the dead, or to the Lord. But we do it anyhow. Perhaps we hope that wherever they are, they will forgive us our shameful acts. No matter. In time, the truth comes out. Grief leads to anger, anger to guilt, guilt to confession.
Finally, one morning, I awoke to find the ocean as calm as a puddle. I blinked my eyes against the sun. Alice was standing over me.
“Go in the water,” she said.
“Why?”
“It is time.”
I didn’t understand. Despite that, I felt myself rising.
“Take this with you,” she said.
I glanced down. My eyes sprang open. Somehow, there, in the middle of the raft, was the green limpet mine. It looked the same as when I purchased it from a man I found on the Internet. I met him in a boat warehouse. Our transaction took less than ten minutes. I hid it in a drum case that I carried onto the Galaxy.
“Pick it up,” Alice said. “And don’t let it go.”
I wanted to refuse, but my body did not operate on its own. I lifted that mine, felt its metal edges against my bare skin, and did as I was told.
When I hit the water, its cold enveloped me, and the weight of the mine sank me quickly. I dropped deeper and deeper. I closed my eyes, certain this was my penance. I was to die at the bottom of the sea, like the others who died because of me. All you do comes back to you. God’s circular judgment.
As the water grew darker, I felt my body crying out to breathe, to expel the carbon dioxide accumulating in my blood. In a few seconds, my human form would submit. Water would fill my lungs, my brain would lose oxygen, and my death would come.
And yet, at that moment, Annabelle, I felt something new wash over me. Something liberating. After all that had happened, and everything I had done, I accepted this as a just ending, because I accepted the world as a just place. In that way, I accepted that God, or little Alice, or whatever force we all answer to, had justly determined my fate.
I believed. And in believing, I was saved.
Just as the Lord had promised.
Suddenly, my hands were empty. The mine was gone. Above me I saw a perfect circle of bright light, and in that circle was the entire sky and the sun, spraying rays like porcupine quills. My body began to drift up toward its center. I didn’t have to do a thing. As I lifted, I felt certain that this is what it’s like to die, and I saw there was nothing to fear from it. The Lord was right. A hovering Heaven is always waiting for us, visible from beneath the Earth’s blue waters. Such a wondrous world.
Moments later I burst through the surface, gasping for breath. I saw the raft, maybe twenty yards away. I saw little Alice, waving her arms. “Here!” she yelled. “Over here!” And I realized I had heard that voice before, from someone with a flashlight the night the Galaxy sank.
When I reached the ladder, Alice helped me inside. I was gulping air as I tried to speak.
“It was you in the raft … that night … you saved me …”
“Yes.”
I fell to my knees and confessed everything. “I brought the bomb onto the boat, Alice … It was me. Not Dobby. I planned to blow it up. It was my fault.”
The words spilled out easier than I imagined, like a loose tooth that after hours of painful clinging suddenly slips onto your tongue.
“I was angry. I thought Jason Lambert was my father. I thought he’d done unforgivable things to my mother—and to me. I wanted him to suffer.
“I’d lost my wife, the only person who mattered to me. I couldn’t afford her medical treatments. They cost too much money, money I never had but others did. I blamed myself. Everything seemed so unfair. I wanted revenge for all the suffering I’d gone through. I wanted Jason Lambert to lose as much as I did.”
“His life,” Alice said.