I don’t know how far across the Atlantic I have traveled. One night I saw a large boat on the horizon. I fired a flare. Nothing. Weeks later, I spotted a cargo ship, so close I could make out the colors on her hull. Another flare. Nothing.

I have accepted that rescue will be impossible. I am too small. Too insignificant. I am a man in a raft, and if I am to survive, the currents hold my fate. The oceans of the world are all connected, Annabelle, so perhaps I am meant to pass from one to another in a ceaseless looping of the planet. Or maybe, in the end, Mother Sea will take me, as a mother bear takes her weak and sickly cub. Put me out of my misery. Perhaps that would be best.

Whatever awaits, that’s what will be. The sick and elderly sometimes say, “Let me go. I am ready to meet the Lord.” But what need do I have for such surrender? I have met the Lord already.

* * *

Looking back on these pages, I see I stopped writing after little Alice spoke for the first time.

I remember only darkness after that. I must have blacked out. The shock of losing Lambert and Geri, the effort of swimming after weeks of inactivity—all that left me a gasless tank.

When I came to, the sun was gone and the evening sky was an indigo blue. Alice was sitting on the edge of the raft, lit by moonlight, her narrow arms crossed in her lap. She wore one of Geri’s white T-shirts, which hung over her knees. The bangs of her hair fluttered with the breeze.

“Alice?” I whispered.

“Why do you call me that?” she said.

Her voice was childlike, yet clear and precise.

“We had to call you something,” I said. “What’s your real name?”

She smiled. “Alice will do.”

My throat was dry, and my eyes were sticky with sleep. As I turned my head, the empty raft brought a sickening wave of grief.

“Everyone is gone.”

“Yes,” she said.

“The sharks got Geri. I couldn’t save her. And Lambert. I couldn’t save him, either.”

I thought about those final moments in the water. Then I remembered.

“Alice?” I said, lifting to my elbows. “Did you say you were . . . the Lord?”

“I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“But you’re a child.”

“Isn’t the Lord in all children?”

I blinked several times. My thinking was foggy.

“Wait . . . then who was the man we pulled from the water?”

She didn’t answer.

“Alice?” My voice rose. “Why did that man die? Are you just mimicking him? Who are you really? Why didn’t you speak before now?”