by Tim Weaver
She was always there, their stranger and betrayer, a woman who’d not shown any interest in her kids, never put up any sort of fight for them, even after their father – when Johnny was thirteen, Rebekah eleven, and Mike nine – had made the decision to move them to New York. She’d never sought out Rebekah in the years after that either, even when Rebekah had made the tough decision not to go to the States with the others, but to stay behind in London and take up a fully paid athletics scholarship at a prestigious private school. In the weeks before he left her, Rebekah’s father had sat at the kitchen table and cried his eyes out every night, even though he knew what an opportunity it was for her. He’d even promised to fly Rebekah out to the US at the end of every school term, even if he had no idea how he’d ever pay for it.
But Rebekah’s mother just remained silent.
Until the year Henry Murphy had returned to New York with Johnny and Mike, and Rebekah had headed to halls of residence in north London, the four of them had lived in the same house Fiona had walked out of, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know where to find them. They had the same phone number. Henry worked at the same police station. If she’d come back at any point in those eight years, she would have found them easily.
‘Has Mum called today, Dad?’
For a long time, Rebekah would ask Henry the same question. He’d always insist that the four of them eat together, so she’d most frequently ask it at the dinner table, and whenever she did, her brothers would stop, the same as her, forks paused above their plates, and await their father’s answer.
But their father’s answer would always be the same. ‘No, honey. She hasn’t.’
‘Why?’
Henry would reach to Rebekah then, to whichever of his sons was on the other side of him, and put his hands on their arms, reassuring them, settling them down. ‘I think if your mother was going to call, she would have done it by now. But it’s not your fault. None of this is any of your fault. You’re the best kids any parent could have asked for.’
‘Is she dead?’
Mike.
It was always Mike who asked that, spoiling the tenderness of their father’s words. He was the youngest, so he had a ready-made excuse for his tactlessness, but he remembered Fiona less too. He had been a baby when she left, his mother just a flicker in the dark.
‘I don’t know, Mikey,’ their father would say.
‘If she was alive,’ Rebekah asked, ‘she’d want to see us, wouldn’t she?’
But their father would never respond to that.
After six years apart from her family, only seeing them in the holidays when Henry could afford to fly her out, Rebekah decided she’d been away from her dad and her brothers too long and applied to American universities. At eighteen, she completed her A levels and bought a one-way ticket for New York.
In that time, her mother still hadn’t come up for air.
By then, Rebekah’s resolve had hardened, and she’d convinced herself she didn’t give a shit. When she arrived at JFK, the three of them were waiting for her, and she knew straight away that – as alien as America was to her – she’d made the right choice to leave the UK. Home wasn’t a place.
It was wherever her family were.
And so, on that first day, as her father drove them back to their house in Brooklyn, as Mike made jokes about his sister’s plummy accent and Johnny talked passionately about the novel he wanted to write, she told herself she was completely at peace.
But, like all lies, eventually it fell apart.
3
She bumped onto the mile-long track that left the main road and went down the slope to Simmons Gully. On the descent, every dip and crag seemed to spear at her through the saddle, the vibrations shuddering up her arms and into her face, but eventually the track flattened into a muddy, uneven parking area.
There was only one car: her Jeep.
It was coated with fallen leaves, sown by the storm, but otherwise it was exactly as she’d left it. The window was still shattered, the tyre still slashed.
She put the bike down carefully, suddenly afraid: what if someone was here? What if they were waiting for her to come back to look for Johnny?
‘Johnny?’ she said quietly, fearfully. She looked at the wall of trees that surrounded her. ‘Johnny?’ she said again, a little louder, then waited for any reaction from nearby: any noise, any sign of movement.
All that came back was silence.
She headed into the forest, following the path she and Johnny had taken less than twenty-four hours before. Somewhere, close by, there was a stream. Soon, though, the sound of it faded, the trees grew thicker, roots punching through the ground like fists, and the path became a clotted, unnavigable maze, swamped with leaves and fallen branches from the storm. Pretty soon, she realized she was no longer on the route she was meant to have taken and had unwittingly carved out a new one. She was lost.
Panic hit her.
As she retreated, trying to get back to the trail that she and Johnny had used the day before – the trail that had led to the dig site – she called out.
‘Johnny!’
She was shouting, her desperation making her careless.
‘Johnny, it’s me. Johnny!’
If someone was still there, they’d have heard her. They’d be coming for her. I shouldn’t be shouting his name like this.
I shouldn’t be –
She didn’t get to finish her thought.
Suddenly she was stumbling sideways into a tree trunk. It stopped her dead. Winded, her hands slimy with moss, she looked up at the branch that had come out of nowhere and swiped her in the throat.
Tears welled in her eyes.
She wiped them away, trying to gather herself, but instead she slumped to her knees, thinking of the last time she’d seen Johnny: the glimpse of him ahead of her in the trees as they’d run for their lives.
She let herself cry, let it consume her, then hauled herself to her feet again, going through her pockets automatically, searching for her cellphone. Except it wasn’t there. All she could feel were the keys to the Jeep.
Her phone was long gone.
It had been taken for a reason: there were no utility poles on the island, no physical phone lines, and only one cell tower.
And a cell tower was no good if you didn’t have a cellphone.
She continued her retreat, back in the direction she thought she’d come, mud caking her. Her hair was damp, her skin cold, and under the shade of the trees she’d begun to shiver. She called Johnny, then again once she’d found her way back to the trail.
And then she came to another stop.
What if her cellphone hadn’t been taken away from this place completely, just dumped somewhere in the forest? If it was close enough, she could use the Bluetooth function in the Jeep to connect to it – and she could make a 911 call from the car.
A charge of adrenalin hit her.
She broke into a sprint.
4
She yanked the driver’s-side door open and slid behind the wheel. The passenger seat was soaked with rain and strewn with glass from the smashed window; the dashboard was wet too, the instruments misted, and there were leaves everywhere.
She didn’t worry about any of it.
Putting her keys on the centre console, she pushed the ignition button and listened to the Cherokee rumble into life. The touchscreen display blinked – the clock showing the time as 14:12 – and then the Jeep logo flashed up and disappeared, and two rows of icons filled in.
She leaned forward, tapping a finger to Phone in the bottom row, but she already knew something wasn’t right. There was no Bluetooth logo on the Phone icon, as there should have been, and when she hit the next screen, she felt her whole body cave: no cellphone was connected. She tried searching for one, knowing hers would automatically have paired if it was close enough, and after ten seconds, a message appeared, confirming nothing was in range.
‘Shit!’
She smashed the steerin
g wheel with the flat of her palm, then again, and again, so frenzied, she accidentally hit the horn.
Its blare was shockingly loud in the quiet of the forest.
Slowly, she slumped forward, her head almost touching the wheel, and stared into the trees, forlorn.
‘Why?’ she muttered.
She was so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers.
‘Why is this happening to me?’
The wind gently stirred the leaves inside the Jeep.
She turned to the back seat, searching for something – anything – she might have discarded the day before that she could put on to warm herself.
There was nothing.
Just two empty child seats.
Before
Kyra wouldn’t stop crying.
‘Ky, please.’
The traffic hadn’t moved in ten minutes. Rebekah had a headache behind her eyes that she just couldn’t shake. And every time she thought of her father, she felt like she was going to burst into tears.
Worse, her and Gareth had barely talked since the funeral. In fact, now she thought about it, they’d hardly spoken in months – certainly not a conversation of any substance. They didn’t sit down to dinner together. He had breakfast at work. They went to sleep at different times, because she was the one getting up during the night, and by early evening she was fried. Her entire focus was Kyra, and Gareth’s focus was …
Rebekah paused.
She didn’t actually know what Gareth’s focus was.
The sound of her phone snapped her out of her thoughts. A second after it had started buzzing on the passenger seat, it switched to the Cherokee’s speakers. As if on cue, the display in the centre console flashed GARETH. Seeing his name surprised her. He never called from work.
She hit Answer. ‘Hello?’
‘Hey, sweetheart.’
That immediately pissed her off. This was pretty much the first time he’d tried talking to her in two weeks, apart from his muted apology at her father’s wake, and he was acting like nothing had happened.
When Rebekah didn’t reply, Gareth said, ‘Are you okay?’
She shook her head, incredulous, her eyes boring into the dash, as if it could relay her anger. ‘Are you kidding me? What do you think, Gareth? Do you think I might be “okay”?’
‘Look, Bek …’ A pause. ‘I told you I was sorry.’
‘Oh, that was your apology, at the wake?’
‘Yes. I mean, no. I mean …’
He faded out.
‘You don’t get it, do you, Gareth?’
‘I told you at the wake, I got stuck in traffic –’
‘I don’t give a shit. Okay? I don’t give a shit why it happened, it’s that it happened. You didn’t apologize properly, we’ve hardly talked in months, we haven’t talked at all since Dad died – and now you’re calling me “sweetheart”, like you’re husband of the year.’
‘I’m sorry. That report had to be in –’
‘A report? Are you serious?’
‘It was a mistake to try to take it in that morning. I can see that now. There was no way I planned to miss the funeral. I wanted to be there.’
‘But you weren’t.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry.’
He sounded so sincere, it knocked her off her stride. She felt confused, lightheaded. In the eleven years they’d been together, she’d never known him give in so easily. ‘Why are you calling me in the middle of the day like this?’
‘I’m really sorry, Bek,’ he said again.
‘What’s going on, Gareth?’
‘Nothing’s going on,’ he replied. ‘You’re upset. You buried your father two weeks ago, and I let you down. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much. I’m starting to think I got screwed at work, that this promotion will never come. All these extra hours I’m putting in, it’s so we can have a better life, but all I’m doing is driving you away. You deserve more than that.’
Rebekah didn’t know what to say.
‘I want to start sitting down and eating together,’ Gareth said. ‘I think that should be our new rule. After Kyra’s down, we cook a meal, and we talk.’
Again, Rebekah felt thrown.
‘Do you agree?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said, still surprised. ‘I do.’
Kyra was quietening now, her tears playing out as a few solitary sobs, and as Rebekah ended the call with Gareth and looked back at her daughter, she felt a familiar sensation of failure: she saw how Kyra’s sobs still pulsed through her body, an echo even as she slept; she saw how the new toy her baby was holding, a pink giraffe, spilled further from her grip with every whimper; she remembered the awful sound of her own raised voice and her anger as she’d shouted Kyra down.
She didn’t want Kyra to remember her like that.
She didn’t want to be that mother.
5
Rebekah stared at the pink giraffe, discarded between the two empty car seats, its tail chewed, the rest of it dotted with bits of food.
She swallowed her emotion.
She didn’t want to cry again.
But it was hard: as she looked at the seats, the giraffe, she realized it had been barely twenty-four hours since she’d seen her daughters yet it felt like days. Weeks. She thought of them being so far away from her, how confused and scared they must have been when she didn’t come home. And the hardest bit was, she didn’t know how to get to them. She didn’t have a way to contact home. She had no phone, her car was useless unless she found a new tyre – and no one knew where she was, or what had happened to her.
And where the hell was Johnny?
Hauling herself out of the Jeep, Rebekah headed back into the forest. She needed to find the dig site. If she found the place they’d ended up in the day before, she’d be closer to where she’d last seen Johnny. But the more she called his name and was met with the absolute silence of the trees, the more the doubts kicked in again.
She tried to dismiss the possibility that he wasn’t answering her calls because he couldn’t – couldn’t let the hopelessness of that thought derail her search. Instead, she forced herself onwards, upping her pace, trying to get warm through movement, through speed, through sheer effort and willpower. She’d spent thirty minutes inside the Jeep running the engine, sitting in front of the heaters as they pumped out full blast, but now she was cold again: it was the last day of October, and there was no frost on the ground yet, but it was in the air. Winter was coming, and it felt almost like a threat. It’ll be so much worse than this if you don’t find a way off this island.
And then her attention switched.
Ahead, she could see a clearing.
She broke into a run, weaving between the trees, trying not to trip – and, after a minute, she passed from the forest onto a sloped patch of earth.
The dig site.
She’d found it.
The ground dropped away twenty feet in a series of ridges, like a staircase. It was bereft of grass, trees, anything but earth, the ground cut into, carved out, brushed down, revealing shapes buried beneath the surface. A piece of thin red barrier tape encircled the site, flickering as the wind picked up and fell away again. Tools had been left scattered everywhere.
‘Johnny!’
She looked from side to side. The dig site was surrounded entirely by trees, by the density of the forest. Calling Johnny’s name again, she moved from the top to the bottom. ‘Johnny. It’s me, it’s Bek. Johnny!’
Heading into the trees beyond, she continued along the same trail they’d taken only twenty-four hours ago and then, eventually, stopped at the edge of a nearby ravine. Below her, breaking out of the side of a bank, was a set of exposed tree roots.
She recognized them immediately.
Beneath those was a mound of freshly dug earth.
6
She continued on, thinking about the freshly dug earth. It wasn’t Johnny down there, buried under that mud – but her thoughts still lingered on the im
age. She doubted she would ever forget it.
Or the memories of what had happened there.
After a couple of minutes, she came to a sudden stop: directly in front of her, under a thick swathe of canopy and protected by an old, gnarled oak, was a flawless boot print.
She instantly recognized the zigzag of the tread.
For a second, she allowed herself to believe it might be fresh. But then she saw more of Johnny’s prints leading into and away from the one she’d stopped at, and some of her own alongside them, and she realized how absurd the hope had been. They were all from the day before.
She screamed into the trees – pained and furious – and, after it was over, as she stood there, heaving and breathless, she glanced at her watch.
Except that was missing too.
Gareth had bought her a Maurice Lacroix for their third anniversary. It had cost him a month’s salary, but it had spent the last six months buried at the bottom of Rebekah’s jewellery box. Since she’d stopped wearing it, her cell had become how she’d kept track of time, but every so often she’d still find herself pulling back her sleeve to look for the watch.
She had no clue how long she’d been out here. An hour? Two? All she knew was that she was cold again, the cut on her face was throbbing, and the light had given way. Above her, the sky remained clear, but it was mauve, not blue.
It’s getting dark.
She headed back in the direction of the dig site – out of breath, unfit – and realized how stupid she’d been. She’d left the flashlight at the general store. If she didn’t find her way out of the forest soon – if it got much darker – she’d lose the trail completely.
Fear hit her, hard as concrete.
