The Raft

Robie and Max continue to debate the necessity of fetching the suit, when suddenly Robie turns to him, and confronts him, shouting, "You're not real! You're dead! You were dead when I shoved you out of the raft...I made you up because I couldn't stand to think about what I'd done to save myself...I brought you back so I wouldn't have to be alone" (171).

Having confessed this to both Max and herself, she stands on the beach with her hand on her mouth. She explains:

the real Max hadn't said a word since the first night. Since he saved my life, twice, and I was ungrateful and yelled at him […] The rest was all my imagination […] It was all me trying to stay sane […] First I shoved his body overboard to save my own life. Then I used him, the memory of him, what little I knew of him, to stay alive. And when I couldn't do it anymore, when I needed something from him, when I needed him to talk to me, I read his journal (172).

The chapter ends with Robie doubting her bravery, but only briefly: "There was no one to make me go in that water except myself. And I was too much of a coward. Not brave enough to save myself. Not brave enough. Or was I?" (173).

Robie braces herself for her mission: "The yellow suit was still out there, about fifty yards offshore. I took a deep breath, which came out a racking shudder" (175).

She wades into the water and reaches the suit. The water is chest-deep. She is very cognizant of her surroundings, vigilant for sharks, but she keeps going, because, "The suit could mean rescue. Salvation" (176). She gets a grip on the arm of the suit and starts dragging it back towards the beach. But her progress is stopped. She says, "Then suddenly, I was tugged backward and lost my hold on the suit. I turned my back to the shore to grab it again, but the suit was gone. Nowhere in sight. I froze and stopped breathing" (177).

The suit resurfaces a moment later, with part of the leg missing, torn off by a shark. From the shore, the phantom of Max shouts at her to move, but she is paralyzed, until he says, "Robie if you don't move, you will die" (177). She scrambles for shore and makes it to safety. 

Once back on the beach, she becomes reflective about Max again:

Max wasn't real. He had never woken up...I wished I hadn't admitted that to myself. Because I needed him then. I needed him. I couldn't do it alone...He sat beside me and took my head in his lap. I just needed a few moments of comfort. Just a few moments. Then I would let him go (178).

When Robie wakes up, Max is gone. She tells herself she will ration his presence, calling on him only when she needs him. Shortly thereafter, she starts talking to Starbuck (the baby seal) instead. She updates Starbuck on her close encounter with the shark, then starts to wonder if talking to a seal is a sign of insanity. 

Robie says, "all I had left was laughter" (180), and she laughs on the beach by herself. 

Hungry, she reflects on the excesses of her old life: "I thought of all the food I'd eaten in my life. All the food I'd wasted in my life. The Happy Meal in Honolulu that ended up on the ground. I didn't even care then, not really. There was always more food. Always. Not anymore" (180-81).

Soon she comes across a young albatross. Albatross chicks are fed by their parents, until one day the parents leave them to fend for themselves. Robie explains the dilemma that the young bird faces:

Do you wait for your parents to show up one last time with food? And if you do wait, how long? Hunger is a powerful feeling that has been sending albatross chicks on their first journey since forever. But wait one day too many and you'll be too weak to fly (181). 

She encourages the young bird to go, and says, "maybe he heard me, maybe he understood, because […] he spread his wings, caught the wind, and deftly flapped his way out above the lagoon" (182). Robie takes this as a positive signbut soon the bird, weakened by hunger, slows and begins to drop into the water of the lagoon. Once his wings are wet, he is too heavy to fly again: "So he would just float there, until either a shark found him or he just succumbed. Doomed. He was doomed" (182).

The next day, Robie focuses on building the wood pile for her signal fire. While she looks for lighters, she finds a beautiful green glass fishing float, and also Max’s ditty bag. She is elated: “Maybe he wasn’t done talking to me yet” (187).

Robie reads more of Max’s journal. Max recounts convincing Brandy’s mother to let him take Brandy to a Taylor Swift concert. When they drive to the concert they encounter a lot of traffic but arrive successfully. Nonetheless, Max gets a bad premonition about the night. 

The next day, Robie finds a new object in the lining of Max’s ditty bag: a tube of Carmex, which gives her sunburnt lips some relief. Her excitement over this small find gives her the energy and encouragement she needs to keep searching for lighters that might help with her signal fire.

As she searches, she comes across another young albatross ready to take flight. This time the bird is strong enough to get away, and even evades a hungry shark that tries to eat it from the surface of the water. Robie is relieved, but still not optimistic, commenting that, “Maybe not everything on the island was doomed. Maybe just I was” (193). 

Robie comes across Starbucktangled in a fishing net on the beach. She tries to free the seal, but she can’t get the net off. The seal starts struggling away from her, making the net tighter, and before long the seal has suffocated herself in the net. Robie cries out, “Not again. Not again. Not again!” (197). She has an “unthinkable idea” (197) and runs back to her signal fire to get away from the death and the idea both. Back at her fire, she earns a victory: one of the lighters she found on the beach contains lighter fluid, enough to start a small flame.

Robie changes her mind after she lights the fire: “Suddenly my unthinkable idea didn’t seem so unthinkable. If I was going to save myself, I had to think selfishly” (199). She ruminates on this a bit more and comes to the conclusion that, “Their deaths would be worth nothing, mean nothing if I didn’t make it” (199). This conviction allows her to go back to Starbuck’s body, and saw off a piece of meat. She doesn’t do it lightheartedly: she cries and apologizes to the seal she thought of as a friend.

When she gets back to the fire, she cooks the meat, and then loses her resolve. She lets it drop to the groundand reads some more of Max’s journal. Max reveals that his premonition about the night of the Taylor Swift concert was accurate. On the way home, he and Brandy get in a car accident. Brandy, who was not wearing a seat belt, does not survive. He finds her body after the accident and is unable to do anything but hold her.

After reading the journal, Robie talks to her hallucination of Max. He insists that she keep her fire going, though she feels too tired to fetch more wood.

She thinks about her life back home, and struggles to pray, but eventually abandons the effort, admitting that, “somehow praying now, when I really needed something, seemed a little too late. Besides, if God was up there, He could make His own decisions. Truth was, I had no strength to plead my case” (209). She falls asleep. 

Robie wakes up to find that she has missed a rainstorm, and that the rain has extinguished her fire. She cries in despair. Then, almost immediately, she looks up and sees a ship on the water, very close to the island. She is not sure if it is a mirage, so she sits down and watches it, unwilling to hope, just waiting to see if it proves real. 

A small boat goes from the ship to the other end of Robie’s beach. Max convinces Robie to move towards the two people who hop off the boat onto the island. She is still reluctant to believe that they are real but realizes that she cannot risk missing the opportunity. She musters the last of her strength and runs toward them on the beach. The people (who are real) are shocked to see her. They are scientists, and quickly take her in their small boat back to their ship. As Robie gets on to their boat, she looks at the island and says goodbye to Starbuck and Max.

Once aboard the ship, Robie is given water, an IV, and meal replacement shakes. She gradually recovers from the hardship of her time on the raft and tells the scientists on the NOAA ship her identity. This allows them to patch a call through to Midway, and Robie gets a chance to speak to her parents. Her father tells her everything is going to be alright, and Robie says, “I decided to believe him” (225).

As the NOAA ship goes back to Midway, Robie reads the final pages of Max’s therapy journal, in which he recounts the aftermath of the crash with Brandy. After she finishes, she makes a discovery that astonishes her: she is wearing the pendant she first found on Max’s necklace. She doesn’t understand how she got it, because “Max never took it off” (230). The story ends with her reflecting as she looks at the necklace: “I think I’m not alone. Maybe I never was” (231).