by Tim Weaver
She broke into a run, sliding on the mud, not wanting to be caught out here at night. She kept looking over her shoulder, the pounding in her ears sounding like footsteps, like a person trailing in her wake. When she reached the dig site, it felt like no victory at all because she knew she had so much further to go, and the paths beyond this were the ones that had vanished in the storm. She felt almost hysterical.
She tripped over, then scrambled to her feet, her palms slathered in earth. She’d hit the ground hard and now every part of her hurt. Branches slapped at her as she started again, ripping her hoodie, nicking her cheeks, her neck, the back of her hands. Sweat froze all the way down the ridge of her spine, and it was even worse on her face, cold as ice. After a while, the dressing she’d used on her wound began to peel away, slackened by the moisture. It flapped as she ran, the gauze obscuring her view.
She tore it off and tossed it into the forest.
I’m never going to find my way back.
I’m never going to find my way –
At last she emerged into the parking area.
She stopped, relief flooding her, and almost collapsed in on herself, her hands on her knees, her breath struggling up through her chest.
Next to her, in the wind, the Cherokee rocked gently on its suspension, making a slight wheeze. The sound brought her back: she was four miles from the store, from the only place she knew she could seek shelter when it got dark. She had no idea about the rest of the island, other than the little Johnny had told her the day before. There might have been better places to stay the night, or to find clothes or food, but there was no way she’d find anywhere quickly without her car.
The bicycle wasn’t going to cut it any more.
She had to fix the tyre on the Jeep.
Before
Rebekah and Gareth’s new routine lasted three months.
She’d been doing locum work – trying to fit it around Kyra, around the nights that Gareth was home, or her best friend, Noella, could babysit – but then orthopaedic departments had become short-staffed in two of the hospitals she’d been working in, and she gradually found herself doing more and more shifts. At the same time, Gareth had started working longer hours, chasing the promotion his boss had dangled in front of him. So, although for the first few weeks they sat down for dinner, watched movies together and went to bed at the same time, those routines soon became sporadic.
There were other, smaller, changes too.
After the routine started to fracture, Gareth seemed to become angrier. One night when a deal went south, he returned home and threw a tumbler at the wall. Another time he wanted to have sex, but Rebekah had come off a shift, then been up all night with Kyra, and was bone-tired, so said no.
‘You’re unbelievable,’ he spat at her and stormed out of the room. The next time they had sex, he was weird and different: silent, aggressive, selfish.
Then, when the anger stopped, he became uncommunicative, incapable of saying so much as a word to her as he arrived home, before disappearing up to bed. Some nights she’d smell whisky on him, or cigarettes, even though he’d told her he’d given up smoking when they met. And then, a few nights later, she caught a whiff of perfume, indistinct and difficult to place, and that was when she thought of the call he’d made to her in the car when he’d first suggested the new dinner routine. She remembered that it had felt so out of character, how he’d apologized so easily – about the funeral, about being late. But had he really been feeling guilty about his late arrival – or was something different going on, some other ghost he’d been exorcizing? Hating herself for doing it, the following night she waited for him to go to sleep, then crept downstairs and went through his phone.
She couldn’t find anything on it.
At the start of June – almost four months to the day after she’d buried her father – she began to feel nauseous.
She went out to the drugstore to pick up a test, even though she didn’t need to. She knew what was up without having to pee on a stick. But she did the test anyway, and she got the blue cross, and that same morning – as she drove Kyra to a play date with one of the mothers Rebekah worked with at the hospital – she called her doctor from the Jeep and booked an appointment.
That was when she almost crashed the car.
As she was finishing the call, she took her eyes off the road for a split second and, as she did, an SUV seemed to come out of nowhere, whipping in front of her. She slammed on the brakes.
Something hit the back of her foot.
‘Asshole!’ she screamed, but the other car was already out of sight. The driver in the lane beside hers shook his head and rolled his eyes in sympathy. She shrugged at him, then reached down to find out what had struck her foot.
To her surprise, it was a cellphone.
She’d never seen it before.
7
Rebekah put the Jeep into Reverse and let it inch back. It did, but jerkily: every time the wheel went through a full rotation, the entire axis seemed to drop and reset. Not knowing what to do, or ever having driven a car with a flat, she kept dabbing at the brake, hoping that the slower she went, the more control she would retain. Eventually, she was facing the exit: the muddy, uneven trail that ascended out of Simmons Gully, to the main road.
She let the car drift forward. The first part worked fine: she hit the exit, the car kept going, she applied a little gas, and – although it lurched and the slashed tyre spun – she kept moving. It was fine even as the gradient steepened: she was moving back and forth between the brake and the gas pedal, trying not to hit either too hard, the slow pace helping to offset the irregular movement of the car.
Halfway up, she hit a pothole.
Suddenly, the car felt like it dropped about thirty feet, lurching awkwardly to the right, even though the depression could only have been a tiny fraction of that. She jammed on the brake, alarmed, unnerved. It’s okay. It’s okay. She tried to calm herself by looking into the mirror, seeing the distance she’d managed, then through the windshield to the main road. She could see the change up ahead between this trail and that, the switch between brown mud and grey asphalt.
It’s okay. It’s not far.
Gently, she pressed her foot to the gas.
The wheel spun in the pothole.
She stopped, hit the brake.
Come on.
She tried again and went nowhere.
Come on, please work.
She pressed on the gas a third time.
The wheel spun, the noise like a shriek. As she glanced to either side of her, she saw the drop-off, became aware of the way the trail canted sharply into the trees. If she lurched, if the Jeep came out of the hole at any sort of angle, she would careen into the forest and drop fifty feet.
Please. This has to work.
‘This has to wor–’
Her cry was swallowed by the roar of the engine. Before she knew it, the Jeep was moving, thumping against the ruts of the track, but heading straight.
Thirty seconds later she reached the top.
As soon as she hit asphalt, she pumped the brake and stopped dead. Her heart was pounding against her ribs. Her head hurt. Her eyes went to the mirror, to the wound on her face, its rawness and ugliness, to the baby seats in the back, to the rear windshield: out the other way, the road unfurled, an arc of grey that followed the southern coastline before it bent left.
It was darker in that direction, the day fading from east to west, clouds gathering above the curve of the earth. She glanced down at the Jeep’s clock.
Almost five.
She hit the accelerator and headed for the gas station.
8
She drove faster along the empty road, less concerned now by the lurch of the car, a series of long-abandoned buildings passing her on either side.
Johnny had told her the island had been in a state of neglect ever since Hurricane Gloria had ripped through it in 1985. Before, it had been touted as New York’s version of Martha’s Vineyard, a
n affluent summer escape for the city’s rich and famous, but now all Rebekah saw was wreckage: fallen tiles, imploded windows, guttering cleaving away, like old, broken bones.
Gloria must have wrought an almost Biblical destruction.
When she got to the gas station, Rebekah pulled the Cherokee to the side, close to where she’d spotted the pile of tyres. The station was only small: a couple of pumps and a building with a single window – but all the pumps were off and the building looked dormant. She remembered something else her brother had told her: nowhere outside Main Street, and the harbour area, was on an electrical grid, so everything else was generator-powered.
She parked and walked over to the building.
Inside, she could see an empty cash register, some basic items for sale, like car oil, but nothing to eat or drink, and certainly nothing she could wear. She backed away from the window and did a circle of the building. At the rear, she found a locked door, as well as a generator, which was secured inside a padlocked cage.
Rebekah refocused on her immediate need and hurried back to the forecourt, dropping to her haunches next to the Jeep’s puncture. Some sort of serial number was printed on the side wall of the tyre. Now she just had to hope she could find a match.
Making a mental note of the number, she headed to the mountain of discarded black rings at the side of the gas station. She started going through them, dragging them out of the way once she’d checked them. Some tyres were so old and worn they didn’t even have numbers on them, or they’d faded over time. Others had flattened and lost air pressure. Eventually, she found one with a similar set of numbers that looked the right size, and rolled it out and away from the others. It was almost dusk, the sun gone, her body aching. She was so tired, so sore.
And now the doubts were flickering again.
The hard part, changing the wheel, was still to come. She knew the theory, because her father had taught her, back when she’d passed her driving test, but he’d looked over her shoulder, making sure she was doing it right. In the years since, she’d stood at the edges of a repair shop and watched the mechanic do everything for her.
And then she thought of something her dad used to say.
He’d said it that first time he’d watched her change a tyre, and he’d said it over and over to the three of them as they were growing up.
‘Take pride in the hard work,’ she repeated quietly.
She rolled the tyre towards the Jeep.
Before
Take pride in the hard work.
Rebekah’s father hadn’t meant just physical labour, he’d meant things that were equally hard, like saying sorry, admitting you were wrong, honesty, kindness and loyalty.
The last was especially important to him.
After returning to the US, Henry had started working for the NYPD out of the 68th Precinct in north-west Brooklyn. His beat was only four square miles, but it was his part of town, full of his people, and he walked it with pride. Sometimes, when Rebekah and her brothers were much older and his shift was over, their father would meet them at their favourite diner on Macdonald Avenue, and Rebekah would ask him why he was still walking the beat in his sixties. He’d had the chance to move up many times – he’d even passed the detectives’ exam – but his response to her was always the same.
‘Take pride in the hard work, Bek.’
Hard work bred loyalty and respect, something he would often remind them of, given how little of either their mother had shown them. He would never criticize Fiona, never name her in conversations, and Rebekah admired him for that – but their mother’s relevance was always implicit. Even when they were young, they understood that much. And Rebekah and Johnny understood it more keenly than ever when, thirteen months before their father passed, Mike lost control of his Tesla on Hutchinson River Parkway, his car leaving the road so hard and so fast it landed on its roof in a reservoir a hundred feet away.
He’d died before the first responders ever got close to the scene.
Mike’s death hadn’t gone unnoticed: he was the creator of a successful social-media app, always appearing in newspapers and on TV; he had a beautiful house in a picture-perfect White Plains suburb, and he was wealthy. People knew him. Their mother, wherever she was, couldn’t have failed to hear about the death of her youngest son, not least because the accident happened on the night of his thirty-fifth birthday. But, still, the hard work Rebekah’s father talked of didn’t apply to Fiona: she hadn’t shown them any loyalty, kindness or honesty, she hadn’t ever said sorry, and when Mike died, she didn’t even call.
She just sent a card.
‘Did you tell her where we lived?’ Rebekah said to her father, when the card turned up. ‘Are you still in touch with her, Dad?’
‘No,’ her father said.
‘Then how the hell did she know where to send the card?’
‘I don’t know, Bek,’ Henry said, weary, broken.
‘It would have been easy enough to figure out,’ Johnny said to Bek, trying to defuse the situation, as he always did. ‘There’s a ton of details about Mike’s death online. It says in the reports that his family lives in Dyker Heights.’
Their mother sent another card when Henry died – almost exactly the same: plain white with a pale pink rose – and both times Johnny, graciously, said the gestures were better than nothing. But Rebekah disagreed. Not coming to her ex-husband’s funeral was one thing, but staying away from her son’s was another.
‘What kind of a mother doesn’t bury her own child?’ she kept saying.
Johnny had just shrugged. Of the three of them, he’d always been more forgiving, more of a believer in redemption.
Once, towards the end of high school, he’d dated a girl called Julisa, whom he adored, and who’d cheated on him after they’d been going out for six months. Rebekah and Mike had told him to dump her, that what she’d done to him was indefensible, but Johnny took her back without hesitation.
Rebekah always remembered the call she’d made to her brother from London a few nights after that. She’d just come back from a track meet, because she was two days out from running the 1500-metres in a national schools championship, and her times had been slower than they had been the week before. She returned to the halls, pissed off, exhausted, and in the call with Johnny had ended up angry with him, telling him he was giving Julisa free rein to do the same thing again.
But Johnny’s response always stuck with her: ‘I’m not, Bek. That’s not what I’m doing at all. I’m giving her the chance to make something right.’
Rebekah could think of no comeback.
I’m giving her the chance to make something right.
It helped that Johnny remembered their mother the clearest of any of them, or at least a version of her. Sometimes, when the three were younger, alone and out of earshot of their dad, Johnny would talk to Rebekah and Mike about her, what she was like. In fact, the only things Rebekah really knew about her mother had come through Johnny.
‘What did she look like?’
That was always Rebekah’s favourite question, born from not being able to remember anything of Fiona except a streak of autumnal hair.
Johnny would always reply patiently. ‘She was tall,’ he’d tell them, ‘about five nine or ten. Do you know how big that is?’ Rebekah and Mike would shake their heads, and Johnny would get up and go to the wardrobe in Rebekah’s room. ‘It’s about up to here,’ he’d say, always on tiptoe until he finally became tall enough in his teens, his fingertips marking out a point at the edge with the flat of his hand. ‘And she was slim.’
‘Was she pretty?’
‘Very. Dad used to call her “glamorous”. She had very pale skin too, but not like she was sick. It was creamy, like Angela.’
Angela had been one of Rebekah’s dolls.
Rebekah would say, ‘She had red hair, didn’t she?’ even though she knew the answer was yes. It was the only thing she really knew about her mother.
‘Yes,’ Johnny would re
spond, ‘like leaves in the fall.’
Ever the writer, Rebekah would think later, when they were all teenagers. By that stage, the conversations about their mother had stopped coming as often – and, when they did, the tone was very different.
‘Fuck her,’ Mike would say.
‘Mike, don’t say that.’
‘Why not, John?’
They would only ever call him John if things were serious.
‘She’s your mom.’
‘She’s not my mom, Johnny. She’s not your mom either. She stopped being our mom when she left us. She’s got “hair like leaves in the fall”, and she’s “glamorous”, and you say she “used to sit us in a circle around her and play games with us” – for what? Like, ten minutes before she dumped us?’
‘We don’t know why she left.’
‘We don’t need to know, Johnny,’ Mike fired back. ‘All we need to know is that she abandoned us. Nothing else matters.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘She’s not coming back, Johnny. Don’t you get that?’
And then Johnny would look at Rebekah, and Rebekah would look back at her brother, and – for a while, at least – Fiona would be forgotten again.
But not completely.
Never completely.
9
Rebekah’s hands slipped from the wrench. ‘Shit.’
She was on her knees, next to the wheel, under the roof of the gas station. The work was so hard, so monotonous, that she’d drifted back to the things that always comforted her in her lowest moments – her family, her memories.
Her girls.
I need to get home.
They’ll think I’ve abandoned them.
Picking up the wrench again, she snapped it into place, on the last of the lug nuts, as random memories of her daughters flashed in front of her eyes. Like a videotape, she paused on the time she’d first put Kyra’s hair into a ponytail, right in the centre of her head, a fountain erupting from its source. Ky had sensed something was new and different and had started pawing at it.
