by Tim Weaver
In the end, the wedding was perfect. At the reception her father gave a warm, funny speech that everybody loved. He didn’t do much public speaking but Rebekah remembered thinking how good at it he was, how natural. He was witty, warm, his jokes a little predictable but delivered with love. He talked about Fiona, but only in passing, which was fine by Rebekah, and when they were eating afterwards, Gareth turned to her, kissed her cheek, and said, ‘I’m so lucky to be a part of your family.’
That was the kind of thing Gareth would say a lot, especially in the early days of their relationship. He got on well with his own parents, even though his father could be tough, but he really connected with Henry. After the wedding was over, they’d found Rebekah’s father asleep in the corner, drunk, exhausted, and Gareth was the one that helped him to the car.
It was easy to forget those times.
After Rebekah and Gareth’s marriage fell away beneath them, it was simpler to believe those moments had never been there between them. But they had. For a long time, their relationship had been good, loving, its foundations stable.
But then the rot had set in.
And, before long, she’d realized she didn’t know Gareth at all.
14
As soon as she got back to the general store, Rebekah spent ten minutes awkwardly trying to open the main door from the inside, so she didn’t have to keep going through the window. Once she was done with that, she dragged in the mattresses, the blankets, the kettle and the microwave, then noticed something else: the leak in the ceiling had stopped.
She felt good: she had a bed, she had food lined up on the counter, she’d managed to find a faucet at the back of the bait-and-tackle place, hidden by grass, and – by the time the sun had gone down – she’d filled a bucket with water.
But, before she went to sleep, the adrenalin wore off, and she was back to thinking about the girls again. As that began to overwhelm her, she pictured Johnny, and spiralled even further. It was the end of her second day alone, and her third full day on the island. It was two nights since anyone, except a brother she couldn’t find, had seen her. No one was coming to rescue her. If they were coming, they’d already be here.
I’m trapped.
She got up and went to the door, the ocean just about visible in the darkness, everything else imperviously dark. Somewhere, she thought she saw a flicker of light – there, and gone again – and she stayed exactly where she was for an hour, watching the blackness, just in case it came back.
It didn’t.
But, still, she couldn’t quite let go of the idea, the hope that a boat might be close by, or in the channel somewhere, within sight of her, so she grabbed the flashlight and headed out. Johnny had told her that Main Street and the harbour were wired into an old electrical grid, built back in the seventies when the island was still a tourist trap, with the original intention of expanding it out into other areas. That was why there was no diesel generator at the store. The power came from somewhere else. She just had to find the switch.
If she could get the lights on in the store, she could leave them on through the night, as a kind of beacon. Then she thought of something else: she’d noted on the map that there was an old lighthouse out on the east coast. Could the lantern be working in that? If not, could she get it going?
She dismissed the idea.
Most lighthouses were operated remotely now, and if it was still working, Rebekah would have seen it. The island, for the most part, was flat. As soon as it got dark, nothing – even Nuyáhshá – could obscure a glow as bright as a lighthouse lantern.
She moved to her right, in the direction of the harbour, following the back of the store. She found herself behind the bait-and-tackle place and, for the first time, wondered whether there were any fishing rods inside. She hadn’t considered it before, because she didn’t have a clue how to fish, but if, and when, she ran short of food again, maybe she’d have to teach herself.
Yeah, because fishing is so easy, she thought dismally.
For now she didn’t have to worry about it, so concentrated instead on the road that sloped down from here to the harbour, the entrance to the wharf padlocked from the other side. Rebekah believed she could probably get over if she had to – the dividing line between the rest of the island and the harbour was a simple chain-link fence – but there was just an empty parking lot, the long jetty and a harbourmaster’s shack beyond.
She moved back along Main Street.
The switch for the grid had to be somewhere close. She shone the flashlight right and left, but it didn’t have as much impact out in the open, and it started to dawn on her how little of her surroundings she could make out.
She thought again about the gas station, about the clicking noise she’d heard, and the memory sent a cold finger up her spine.
I don’t want to be out here any more.
She hurried back to the store.
I hate this darkness.
15
That night, she dreamed.
She’d had a recurring nightmare for a while, didn’t remember when it started, only that it had arrived and never gone away. Sometimes it would slide into the background and stay there for a time – but, eventually, it always crept back into the light.
It started with Rebekah in a corridor, many floors up in an apartment block, an unobtrusive tan carpet beneath her feet, cream paint on the walls.
The door to an apartment was open. It was always on her left, always a pale blue, and always open just a crack. Faint light leaked out into the corridor from inside, and she saw the same 127 halfway up the door, its 7 fractionally askew. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but Rebekah did. Every time she approached, she looked at the 7 and thought, Seven is meant to be a lucky number.
It was an expensive apartment, open, with huge windows looking out at the Manhattan skyline. There was a mezzanine level on her right, a glass and steel staircase leading up to it, and a black and chrome kitchen below that. Off to her left there was a wall of glass bricks, the distorted shape of a bed behind it.
Music started playing.
As soon as it did, everything changed. She stood in the doorway and felt a sudden overwhelming sense of fear, as if she’d wandered into a place she was never meant to. Now it was a fully fledged nightmare: she could feel herself struggling to breathe. When she tried to turn around she couldn’t. Her feet had sunk into the carpet, and she suddenly had no shoes on, and the fibres were clawing at her toes, wriggling like the whole thing was alive, wrapping around her feet and ankles, pinning her to the floor.
I think you should stay.
Always the same voice.
Not male or female, just there, behind her.
I think you should stay, Rebekah.
She couldn’t turn, couldn’t see who was speaking to her, but she didn’t want to stay. She so desperately didn’t want to stay. Not here, not ever.
I think you should stay.
Please let me go.
I think you should stay.
Please.
And then she was crying.
Begging. Screaming.
Please let me –
She woke up.
It was morning. She’d sweated beneath the blankets, and as she threw them off her and shuffled to the edge of the mattress, she looked around the store and tried not to think of the dream. It had been the worst version of it that she’d had for a while: more desperate, more lucid, as if she could still feel its residue in her skin, even awake. It’s over now, she told herself, but the thought didn’t bring her any comfort.
Rebekah knew that, sooner or later, it would be back.
Like the island itself, there was no escape.
Before
Rebekah did nothing with the cellphone for a couple more days, trying to figure out how to play things. Frustrated, she tried to remember why she’d waited nine months to get the phone unlocked, but just one look at her daughters, both of them so small, so innocent, so reliant on her and Gareth, re
minded her. She hadn’t wanted to take the chance of destroying her marriage before Chloe had even arrived in the world.
So, was it better to live in denial?
Maybe it was then, but not any more. She couldn’t stop thinking about the cellphone now, couldn’t help wondering if it belonged to Gareth, and the not knowing was tearing her apart. The problem was, if she left it somewhere for him to find, just so she could gauge his reaction, he could deny everything, anyway, because there was nothing to tie him to it. No emails, certainly no texts or calls. Even the name associated with it was a dead end.
Rebekah still had no idea who Willard Hodges was.
It was also possible that it really wasn’t Gareth’s phone, but she knew she needed to know either way, even if she hated the idea of what the wrong answer might do to them. The thought kept coming to her that, if it turned out as she feared, Chloe and even Kyra would never know a time when the four of them had lived together. The portrait of a fractured family would be normal to them, how it was, how it had always been.
In the end, though, none of it really mattered.
At the start of April, four days after Noella had told Rebekah that she needed to confront Gareth about the cellphone, Rebekah arrived home from taking the girls to a market at Prospect Park, and found Gareth slumped at the kitchen table. He’d already opened a bottle of bourbon.
Rebekah frowned. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I took the afternoon off,’ he said quietly.
Kyra ran over to her father before Rebekah could ask why, and he took her in his arms, sitting her on his lap. He leaned into her, smelt her hair, listened to her as she described eating cotton candy, smiled when he was supposed to and asked her questions. Eventually, he glanced at Rebekah for the first time since they’d got home: he had tears in his eyes. The sight of them hit her, like a punch. She backed up, bumping against the countertop.
‘You wanna watch some TV, sweetheart?’ he said to Kyra. His voice was small inside the kitchen. In the stroller, parked in the space between them, Chloe was sleeping soundly. Gareth went into the living room with Kyra and set her up in front of the television. When he returned to the kitchen, he was wiping his tears with the edge of his sleeve. He sat down in the same chair.
‘What’s going on, Gareth?’ she asked, the words like dust in her mouth. She knew exactly what was going on.
She’d seen him cry only once in all the time they’d been together. That had been a shimmer, like a change of light, in the moments after Kyra had been born. She’d put it down to his upbringing, to the blood in his veins: although she’d always liked his father, he was hard on Gareth, a perfectionist, uncompromising.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly.
‘Sorry for what?’
He swallowed, said nothing, just stared at her.
She was carrying a bag on her left shoulder, the strap passing between her breasts. The pockets were overflowing with creams, loose rubber teats for the bottles, nappies. As she thought of the word nappies, she thought of the last time the two of them had talked like this – standing in virtually the same places in the same room, four months before – as Gareth had told her, pettily, that they were called diapers in America. She’d traded so many British words for US versions since moving to the States, but just as many – like Mummy – she’d never quite let go of, even when Kyra called her Mommy in return. She lifted the strap of the bag over her head, set it down, and – slowly, as if pulling old bones out of a burial site – she went into the pocket of her coat.
Cell, not mobile.
That had been one change she’d made.
She put the phone down on the table between them.
‘Is this what you’re sorry for, Gareth?’
16
An hour after getting up, she finally found the switch for the electrical grid: it was in a fenced area, cut into a bank, a quarter-mile out of Main Street.
Something had been removed from it.
A battery of some kind.
Rebekah broke the locks on the security fence, anyway, and tried pulling and resetting the switch – but there was no buzz, nothing came to life. Without the power source, she couldn’t turn on the lights in the store. She couldn’t use a heater if she ever found one. Worse, she’d hauled the kettle and microwave from the hostel for no reason.
She looked down at herself, despondent, in the same clothes for the fourth day running, and thought of her girls. What would they be doing now?
Who would be looking after them?
She jumped into the car and headed back to the forest, trying to keep her mind occupied. She walked its trails for the entire afternoon, using the map from the hostel to find new areas she hadn’t explored. At one stage, she became scared of getting lost, and then – for a while – actually did, but in the end she found her way back to the parking area. She got into the Jeep, tired and ground down, the sun burning out in the sky. Her legs were like lead. She was starving. Her voice was hoarse from repeatedly calling Johnny’s name.
And she still hadn’t found him.
She spent all of the next day outside the store, watching the sea.
She hardly moved from sunrise to sunset.
That night, after eating from one of the cans, the leak in the ceiling slowly returned, and she became convinced she could hear the faint chug of a boat. Springing to her feet, she rushed to the window again and stared into the blackness, forcing herself to see something. The harder she stared, the more she remembered from two nights before when she’d thought she’d glimpsed a light in the ocean. Could it really have been a boat?
Or am I seeing and hearing things now?
She definitely couldn’t see anything tonight, and the noise she thought she could hear kept fading in and out with the wind, making her even more uncertain that she’d actually heard anything at all. After forty minutes, she retreated to the mattress, and felt like she was going to cry.
But then she heard it again.
She jumped to her feet and, this time, ran for the door. Yanking it open, she sprinted to the back of the store, which faced out to the ocean, and peered into the night. When the chug of the boat failed to materialize, she began furiously waving her flashlight from side to side above her.
Nothing.
No sound, no light out to sea.
Finally, she gave up, feeling ridiculous, and retreated inside. And then, after a while, she thought she heard the boat again and rushed out to the back of the store for a second time. And for a second time, there was no boat and no lights in the water.
She went back to bed, tried to sleep, to close her eyes and tune out the rhythm of the sea – but then she thought she heard the boat again.
She raced back outside.
Still nothing.
It went on like that all night.
Before
Rebekah pushed the cellphone further across the kitchen table, until it was right under Gareth’s nose, but there was no reaction in his face.
He played with the glass of bourbon in front of him. The liquid rocked towards the rim of the tumbler, some of it spilling over his fingers. ‘You weren’t supposed to find that cell,’ he muttered quietly.
‘No shit. How did you know I had?’
‘Kyra told me she overheard you talking to Noella. She asked me if I had a secret phone that Mommy wasn’t supposed to know about.’
For some reason, Rebekah smiled. She’d been worried about the ways in which confronting Gareth might affect the girls in the future – but, in the end, Kyra was how Gareth realized he’d been caught.
‘When did you find it?’ he asked her.
‘Ten months ago.’
He frowned. ‘Why did you hold on to it for so long?’
‘Why do you think, Gareth?’
Because of our girls.
Our marriage. Our life together.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.
‘For what?’
His eyes pleaded with her not to make him say
it. Rebekah’s head was buzzing. She was hot, could feel pain in her chest and tears coming, a wave gradually washing into shore.
Don’t cry.
‘I never meant …’ He stopped.
‘You never meant to hurt me? It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?’
‘She was just …’
Gareth paused, but those three words were enough to cut Rebekah in two. She. Did Rebekah want to find out who she was?
Did it even matter now?
‘I was just so consumed by work. It happened without me …’ He swallowed, unable to look at her now. ‘It just happened. I kept thinking, You need to put an end to this. This has to stop. But I couldn’t.’
Rebekah blinked. Don’t cry.
Not for him.
Not for this.
‘We worked on this project together and …’ He faded out again.
You’re such a cliché, she thought. You worked on a project together. It just happened. You tried to stop it but you couldn’t. And now, months later, you’ve finally got the balls to tell me – but only because I found your phone. Only because you knew you’d been rumbled.
She didn’t say any of that, just looked at him. It was clear that her silence was eating him up, so she prolonged it, enjoying the narrowness of his face, pinched by the pain and guilt of what he was being forced to drag out. She looked down at Chloe, sound asleep in the stroller, only weeks into her life and oblivious to everything.
