The Wreckage

He was supposed to be flying the plane to Thunder Bay to sell it. He flew it into Lake Superior instead.

For three years, Cal Merrick has been a man inside a closed door. His son Jonathan died at twelve of a misdiagnosed illness, and Cal has spent the years since in the upstairs bedroom of a house in Mason, Michigan, with a wife who kept going and a daughter who learned not to knock. He has not spoken to God since the afternoon the line went flat.

On a January morning, he files a flight plan he does not intend to complete.

He survives the crash.

What follows is forty-nine days alone on the shore of Michipicoten Island - fire, hunger, frostbite, and a verse his eight-year-old daughter wrote in purple crayon and slipped into his coat pocket the night before he left. Back home, his wife Diane sits on the bedroom floor at two in the morning asking herself if the chapter of Job she read at her husband two weeks ago is the reason he is missing.

The Wreckage is a novel about a marriage that has stopped speaking, a father who stopped praying, and the long way back from the bottom of a grief that does not lift on a schedule. It is about what survives a man when nothing else does. It is about the difference between the silence of a closed door and the silence of a God who is waiting on the other side of it.

For readers of Peace Like a River, Gilead, Silence, and The Road - literary fiction that takes faith and suffering seriously, without sermon and without cushion.