by Tim Weaver
She put down the phone and grabbed her laptop, just as Kyra wandered through to the kitchen.
‘Hungry, Mommy.’
‘Okay, sweetheart, just give me a sec, all right?’
Kyra started pulling on Rebekah’s leg, her foot, anything she could get her small arms around, and when that failed, her mom’s attention still fixed on the Google search for Willard Hodges, she simply stared Rebekah down. Eventually, Rebekah stared back. If looks could kill.
She broke into a smile, the moment giving her a brief respite from the phone, from the burden of suspicion, and she lifted Kyra onto her lap and kissed the top of her head. Through the kitchen door, she checked on Chloe: she was on her mat, staring up at her mobile, her legs and arms going. Kyra started bashing the laptop’s keyboard with her hands.
‘Hold on, sweetheart, hold on,’ Rebekah said, and set Kyra down again. Onscreen was the Willard Hodges search: the top hit was a Wikipedia page about a politician from the 1820s. The rest were just as irrelevant: ancestry websites, a few Facebook pages, defunct blogs.
I’ve got to stop before I drive myself crazy.
She snapped the laptop shut.
But she couldn’t stop.
That night, Gareth arrived home late again. She rolled over to face him, but didn’t open her eyes, smelling the whisky and cigarettes on him.
Inside ten minutes, he was snoring.
She lay there, determined not to do what she was telling herself she should: she didn’t want more suspicion, more mistrust. She just wanted to forget she’d ever found the phone.
Except she couldn’t.
Eventually she sat up and flipped back the covers. Gareth didn’t stir. Padding into the girls’ room, she checked they were both asleep, then wound her way downstairs. His jacket, his wallet, the keys to the house, and his work cell were on the table near the front door. She picked up the phone, popped out the charging cable and started to hunt around on it. She’d done it once already, in the weeks before she’d found the cellphone in the car, but she spent longer going through his Contacts this time, through his recent calls, through his email, internet and camera. There was no one called Willard Hodges in his address book, no emails from the account on the phone, no texts from the number. Gareth used Dropbox for work, which she checked, and then she went through his calendar to see if anything stood out. Just meetings, one after another. He could have used the names of the people he worked with to disguise something else: a non-work meeting; an hour in a motel; a woman; an affair.
Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.
The cell she’d found in the car might belong to someone he was doing business with, or one of his friends, or someone to whom he’d given a lift. Gareth would drive the Cherokee over to Giants games once or twice a month with clients. He often talked about giving rides there and back to people who lived along the route, in Jersey City and Hoboken. What if the phone had innocently fallen out of a pocket at some point?
What if it hadn’t?
It was the age of the phone that bothered her most: she seriously doubted any of the slick-suited assholes Gareth worked with would have been caught dead with a cell as old or as basic as the one she’d found, but it also made no practical sense. So much of his job, so much of the work he did with clients and that they did with him, was reliant on the Cloud.
The phone she’d found barely even had the web.
Defeated, she headed back to bed.
13
Rebekah looked at the padlock on the floor, barely daring to believe she’d succeeded, then flipped back the hasp on the hostel door.
Ahead of her, a corridor extended out, dusty, semi-lit by the building’s windows.
She hurried inside and stopped at the first door. It was a plain bedroom: two beds, two wardrobes. But the beds had blankets on them. She would never have guessed that the sight of something so simple would elicit such a profound sense of relief, but she let herself breathe it in before she checked the wardrobes. They were empty.
Returning to the corridor, she discovered that two of the doors led into poky identical bathrooms, and one at the end into a simple kitchen. In the corner, there was a generator, but it looked like it had been disconnected for the winter: it was sitting away from the wall and part of the back had been removed. If it had been working, she could have fired up the hot water and taken a shower in one of the bathrooms, but any disappointment she felt soon dissolved: when she checked the cabinets, she found teabags, coffee, some cans of chicken soup, two rows of canned clam chowder, some beef barley soup and a pack of root beer. She started to gather them up, feeling another intense rush of elation: these discoveries were so small, so perfunctory, but it felt like she’d struck a vein of gold.
After she’d loaded all of the food into the Cherokee, she went back for blankets, then switched her attention to a mattress. She pulled one off the nearest bed and dragged it out to the car. Once it was loaded, a second thought came to her: what about Johnny?
He’d need a mattress too.
This time, because of everything else she’d put into the Jeep’s trunk, she couldn’t get Johnny’s in. She shoved at it as hard as she could, face red, but it kept folding and springing back to her. Eventually, she paused, watching the second mattress slide out, over the tailgate onto the damp grass.
Did she need a mattress for Johnny?
Am I really going to find him alive?
She pushed the thought down before it could take hold, and began trying again, getting under the mattress this time and using a shoulder. It worked. It wobbled one way and the other, then finally slid over the headrests into the back seat.
She stopped for a second, getting her breath back, before returning inside and taking the stairs to the first floor.
The rooms were almost an exact match to their counterparts on the ground floor, but in one of the last, she spotted something different. A wedge of paper, bent in half and placed under a leg on one of the beds.
Something printed on it had caught her eye.
She bent down and rocked the paper out from under the frame. As the bed tilted towards her, uneven now, she unfolded the piece of paper, its faded surface covered with years of dust and grime. It was an old leaflet, printed for tourists back in the eighties – and on the back there was a map.
It was of the island before Hurricane Gloria had changed its entire topography, but it would do just fine. It showed its layout, some of the routes around it, the beaches and dunes, the estuaries and marshes, and the full extent of the forest where she and Johnny had last been together.
As she left the hostel with a microwave and a kettle, for the first time in forty-eight hours she was feeling vaguely positive. She still needed to check out the second hostel, but it was getting darker and it could wait for now.
Today had been enough of a success.
All of a sudden she felt she could exist on the island for a few days, maybe even a week. If she could somehow get the electricity working at the store, if she could find a supply of drinking water, if she could get some heating going, a kettle boiling, a microwave cooking, she could survive until a rescue came.
Because it had to arrive soon.
Noella was her best friend. Gareth was the man she’d spent twelve years with and she was the mother of his children. They would have reported her missing by now.
Well, Noella definitely will have.
She thought about Gareth, about their turbulent history, about the phone she’d found in the Jeep. She thought about where the name Willard Hodges had eventually led her.
And, as she did, she wondered to herself: Would it be easier for Gareth if she never made it home alive?
Before
The morning after Rebekah had checked Gareth’s work phone and found nothing, she went to see Noella.
Growing up, Noe had lived in the same neighbourhood, and had dated Mike for a time in high school. Even after they’d split, she would still hang around at the house, and when Rebekah finally made
the move to New York, they began spending more time together, and quickly grew close.
These days, she was more like a sister than a friend.
‘Why don’t you confront him about it?’ Noella asked.
They were standing on the front steps of her house, which she shared with her boyfriend, a UPS delivery driver called Tommy. Noella’s ex-husband had been a malicious prick and, as well as having to contend with him, she’d also had to deal with cysts on both ovaries, which had made attempts to start a family a long, torturous journey, mapped with heartbreak and, ultimately, failure. It always seemed cruel to Rebekah that Noella had had to endure such a struggle: she would have been such a great mom, and had been so good with Kyra and Chloe. Any hardness she carried, calcified in the fallout from some of the awful relationships she’d had, and in her inability to have children, never showed when she was around the girls. In those moments, it all clicked, like puzzle pieces falling into place.
‘Bek?’ Noella pressed. ‘Just ask him about it.’
‘I want the truth.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I want to know more before I confront him.’
Noella frowned, her blue eyes narrowing, her coarse dark hair shifting in the breeze. ‘Are you scared of him?’ She paused, watching Rebekah. ‘You’re not scared of him, are you?’
‘No.’
‘You said he’s never hit you.’
‘He hasn’t.’
‘Because if you’re scared of him, I’ll come with –’
‘He doesn’t scare me, Noe.’
‘So why go to the trouble of doing the detective shit? Just wait until he gets home, then tell him you found a phone, and have him explain his way out of it. If he’s stumbling around even for a second, you’ll know he’s guilty. Take it from me. Most cheaters aren’t good liars.’
‘He might not be lying.’
Noe shrugged. ‘How are you going to know if you don’t ask?’
‘I want to catch him in the lie.’
‘Why bother?’
‘I’m not going to destroy my marriage on the basis of a hunch, Noe.’
She grimaced. ‘You’ve had that phone for nine months. Think about that. Nine months. It’s time you knew the truth – about him, and about the woman he’s seeing.’
‘I need to be absolutely sure.’
‘How are you going to be sure if you never confront him? The facts are staring you in the face, Bek. Gareth’s a good-looking guy. He’s confident, he’s charming. He’s getting home late at night, stinking of booze and perfume. The guy’s cheating on you. You know it, I know it.’
‘I don’t know it. Not for sure.’
Noella looked at Rebekah as if she was the most naïve woman on the planet. ‘Bek, he’s getting home in the middle of the night –’
‘I know. I heard you.’
Noella eyed her, clearly conflicted as to whether she should say anything else, then shrugged and waved at the girls in the back seat of the Cherokee. ‘Just promise me this,’ she said, from the side of her mouth while smiling at Kyra. ‘If he’s cheated on you, don’t forgive him.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve said the same thing a few times. You catch a man in the act, whether it’s in the emails he’s sending or with his dick out in some motel, you always go off like a firework. You think, Screw him. You think, That son of a bitch is never going to darken my doorway again. Then some time passes and you discover how lonely it is on your own, and he’s turning up at your house, crying, begging you to forgive him, and this little voice in your head suddenly says, “Maybe he really means it. Maybe he’s changed.” You still tell him no, but by then the doubts have kicked in. And when the girls –’ she pointed to the Jeep ‘– are up crying at two in the morning because they’ve got colds or a fever or whatever, and you can hardly function because you’re just so damn tired, I bet the idea of someone’s support – especially someone who knows the kids, whom they’re comfortable with – will be pretty welcome. And, before you know it, you let him in again, start to believe he’s changed, and then he’s acting like nothing ever happened. But here’s the thing: something did happen. And if it happened once, Bek, it’ll happen again.’
‘I get it, Noe. I do.’
‘You don’t know how hard it is.’
‘I can take a guess.’
But Noella was already shaking her head. ‘I’m not talking about having some asshole cheat on you.’
‘So what are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about surviving on your own.’
2
* * *
BREAK
Before
Rebekah first told her dad that she wanted to be a doctor when she was fifteen. He said she’d be better off following him into a career as a cop, because she was – in his words – ‘tough and liked asking questions’. After he’d left the army, being a cop was all he understood, so it wasn’t a surprise he saw it that way, but Rebekah often wondered if the seven years she’d spent apart from her father, in a different country, had also clouded his view of what she was capable of: he didn’t think she had the endurance to make it as a doctor, because he wasn’t aware of her potential. Or perhaps there was a much simpler reason: her father loved her – and he never wanted her to feel the disappointment Johnny had.
From as far back as Rebekah could remember, Johnny had always wanted to be a writer, his bedrooms constantly stacked with old paperbacks. He loved science fiction and horror stories, but his real passion was history: his heroes were James Michener and Ken Follett, and his favourite novel was The Pillars of the Earth. After high school, he went on to study English at Brooklyn College; once he graduated, he returned home and wrote the great American novel on the veranda at the back of the house, a 700-page epic set in 1624 when the Dutch first landed at the southern tip of modern-day Manhattan. And after it was written, after he’d imagined himself on the bestseller lists, on tours around the country, at a table in a store signing copy after copy, he began to accumulate a pile of rejection letters a foot high. For Johnny, the reality had been crushing: eighteen months after it was finished, he consigned the novel to a dusty box under his bed, and began working behind the counter of an electronics store in Bay Ridge that made the same every year as Radio Shack made in an hour. At the time, Rebekah didn’t understand how her father must have felt, but when she finally became a mother she did: we want our kids to have the best jobs and the perfect life – but we don’t want to see them fail while trying.
In the end, though, Rebekah didn’t fail.
A year after she met Gareth in a bar on Madison Avenue, she was accepted to NYU’s School of Medicine. Four years after that, she began a residency at New York Presbyterian, and just before her first Christmas as a resident, Gareth took her to a restaurant with views over Central Park and asked her to marry him.
During their five-year engagement, they often talked about setting a date but they were both so focused on their careers it was a conversation that tended to disappear into the background. But then, after Mike died in the car accident, it was as if something had shaken loose: the wedding became far more important, something definite in a time of great uncertainty.
They were married in a church in Dyker Heights. Rebekah’s father always maintained he was Irish Catholic, which was partly true in as much as their surname was Murphy and his grandparents had come from Donegal. But there had never been much celebration of Henry’s heritage at home, and their mother’s family, according to what Johnny had overheard their father saying on the telephone one night, were Jehovah’s Witnesses from Essex.
Even so, a Catholic ceremony made Gareth and his family happy, and it made her dad happy too. Rebekah hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but it seemed so obvious when he fell sick soon after. Perhaps, on some deep level, he’d felt the illness in him, an eel writhing inside a net; perhaps he’d suddenly caught a clear vision of his impending mortality, and returning to church
was the first step to whatever came next.
‘It’s been so long since I’ve been,’ he’d said to Rebekah, as they arrived in the car. ‘I hope he can forgive me.’
Rebekah looked at him from beneath the veil, uncertain whom he meant. ‘Who are you talking about, Dad?’
She could hear the panic in her voice, as she wondered if her father was losing it, just seconds before he walked her down the aisle on the most important day of her life.
But then, when he didn’t reply, she followed his eyeline towards the spaces above the main doors and saw who he was referring to.
He with a capital H.
A statue of Christ was gazing back at them.
‘Don’t worry,’ Rebekah said, and squeezed her father’s hand, wondering if it might be nerves. He’d told her in the days beforehand that he wasn’t concerned about his speech, but maybe that had been a lie to protect her and stop her worrying. ‘You’ve got nothing to ask forgiveness for, Dad.’
It occurred to her then that she had no real idea if that were true or not. She didn’t know how many men he’d killed in Vietnam. She didn’t know how many people he’d shot as a cop. She didn’t believe he would ever seek any pleasure in either, but she knew there had been a lot that Henry had chosen not to bring home when she was growing up. He would tell them enough about Vietnam, enough about being a cop to keep them sated, but in his eyes, their mother leaving had always been enough for them to cope with. That, too, was a story Rebekah knew her father had downplayed – the real tale of her parents’ marriage and why her mother had left. She often wondered if he was the reason Fiona had walked out on them, but she’d never found any evidence of that. Her father had always said Fiona’s decision had come out of nowhere, and eventually it became much easier for Rebekah to blame the whole thing on her.
