Marissa tried to shift her position enough to ease her back and again Whippet-Face looked annoyed, the way people did on airplanes when they realized some of her was going to possibly come into contact with some of them or their seat. The woman said something unhappily in Italian to the man next to her, or maybe it was Greek or Russian—why hadn’t she studied languages spoken by people instead of those spoken by computers? Whatever it was, it didn’t flatter her; whining sounded the same in every language, she thought.

Unable to stand the discomfort any longer, she unsnapped her life vest and took a full, deep breath. She was able to straighten in place and roll her neck. It helped, but all of that activity—the full range of what she was able to do in the space she was allotted—had taken about thirty seconds. Now was not the time for an attack of claustrophobia. The clouds were moving off and the sky rapidly cleared. The limitless blue soothed her until she began to think about how far that sky stretched, how big the ocean below it seemed, and how very, very tiny their lifeboat was.

The sun was only halfway out of the water. She wished for sunglasses. Someone said it was six-thirty. Then it was six-thirty-four. Every two minutes someone new took out their cell phone, muttered, stared up at the sky and put it away again.

Dear Dad:

I’m glad you spent the three months of chemo sharing all those great movies with me. I don’t think I appreciated how good Lifeboat was until now. It might have been a different movie if there had been twenty or so characters to keep track of, and possibly a lot less interesting if none of them had been able to do more than stretch once in a while.

No one here looks like Tallulah Bankhead,with or without her panties.

Love, Marissa

P.S. Still waiting to hear from you about how heaven really feels about homosexuals.

P.P.S. Think I’ll tell Mom. I expect it to go about as well as when you told her that you were gay.

The sound of her backpack zipper turned heads. A lot of people had either backpacks or small cases but she was the first to seriously open up. She took out the paperback she’d finished on the plane. People were looking daggers at her, as if trying to distract herself was letting the team down.

She read. Nothing in the book seemed familiar but then the flight seemed months ago instead of yesterday. She turned the page, could recall nothing from the previous one but kept going anyway.

After the water and food rations had been shared, the men demonstrated how much easier it was for them to pee—discreetly, of course. Around ten-thirty they thought they saw another lifeboat on the horizon but there was no answer to the flash of their signaling mirror. Their boat had drifted substantially closer to the low, white cloud. It must be a land mass of some kind, Marissa thought. After all, New Zealand was the “land of the long white cloud.” It said so in her paperback. She wished now she’d gone to New Zealand instead of Tahiti.