by Tim Weaver
This time, Rebekah couldn’t swallow the lump in her throat.
It was obvious now why there were emails on the cell from clothing stores where Gareth had never shopped – because he wasn’t shopping for himself. Rebekah had eventually googled the vineyard he’d had a message from and discovered it was also a hotel, which explained that too.
‘Did you two have a nice time upstate?’
He couldn’t even meet her eye.
‘The hotel looked very posh,’ she said, twisting the knife. ‘I was trying to remember when you took me there.’
But they both knew the answer.
He hadn’t.
Before Chloe, she’d talked to him about getting away for a weekend, the two of them and Kyra, somewhere far out of the city where there was no traffic and no noise, and they could forget about their jobs for a while. But he always had some excuse. Too tired. Too much work. Too expensive.
‘And she was a Giants fan,’ Rebekah said, a final jerk of the blade. ‘That must have been great for you. I mean, I never did understand American football, did I?’
‘I’m sorry, Bek,’ he said, scarcely audible now.
‘Why Willard Hodges?’
He shrugged.
‘Where did that name come from?’
‘I just made it up,’ he said, but something lingered in his face, and she couldn’t tell if it was contrition or if he was concealing something else.
This time, she didn’t have the will to find out.
‘You need to leave,’ Rebekah said, steel back in her voice.
‘Bek, hold on.’
‘I want you out of the house.’
‘Look, Bek, we need to –’
‘I want you out of the house by tonight.’
‘Bek, come on.’
‘I don’t want to see your face, Gareth,’ she said, and sucked in a long, painful breath. ‘I can’t bear to look at you any more.’
17
The warning light pinged into life.
Rebekah was heading back out to the forest to look for Johnny, and had been so consumed by thoughts of her brother that she’d overlooked something else.
Gas.
The needle was already below the quarter mark. There might be enough to get her through another day, maybe two at a stretch, but she wouldn’t get beyond day seven or eight on the island without filling up. That meant she had no choice: she had to figure out a way to get the pumps working at the gas station – and that meant breaking more locks on more doors.
The prospect weighed heavily on her and, as she drove, she struggled to stay awake. She hadn’t slept at all during the night because she’d kept hearing the boat – or thought she had – and now the fatigue was like carrying an extra body strapped to her back. Even on the short drive from the store, out to the gas station, she could feel herself drifting, eyes getting heavier, body sinking. In the end, after her head tipped forward for a split second, she decided to pull over.
She crawled onto the back seat.
Almost immediately, she fell asleep.
By the time she woke up it was early afternoon, and the sunshine of the morning had been replaced by rain. It tapped gently against the roof and, for a while, Rebekah lay there listening, wondering what Kyra and Chloe would be doing now. It was Thursday, 4 November, according to the readout on the Jeep’s dash. That meant they should have gone to daycare, or Noella might have had them, or maybe Gareth had taken some time off from work to look after them. Since October, she’d taken the girls to the park every day, so Kyra could kick around autumn leaves. She loved the crunching sound they made. Maybe Rebekah would have been doing that with the girls if she was home right now. Maybe she and Kyra would have been playing games in the living room while she bounced Chloe on her knee.
Maybe.
She wondered what Gareth would do with the girls at night. Would he have moved back into the brownstone, as if Rebekah had never kicked him out? She pictured him in their bed, playing with the girls, making them laugh, the three of them already starting to forget Rebekah existed. She knew it was absurd – she’d only been away from them for six nights – but she couldn’t stop. A parade of images passed in front of her eyes, snapshots of normality in which the girls were grown-up: she saw Kyra on her graduation day with only Gareth alongside her, his hair salt-and-pepper grey; she saw Chloe as a ten-year-old playing soccer at school, looking around for Rebekah and finding only Gareth on the sidelines; and then she pictured a moment, equally irrational, when they forgot her altogether, the mention of her name meeting nothing except blank expressions.
In her head, the girls didn’t remember their mother at all.
Just as Rebekah didn’t remember hers.
18
At the gas station, she left the car next to one of the pumps and walked to the back of the office. Again, she took the jack with her and, again, she attacked the door’s lock, her technique refined after her efforts at the hostel. After a couple of minutes, it pinged off and landed in a patch of weed-broken asphalt.
As she picked it up, she glanced to her left.
That was the direction the clicking sound had come from.
The abandoned properties, built on a slope between the gas station and the sea, looked like they’d once been vacation homes. The windows that weren’t boarded up were dark and smudged with salt, like eyes with cataracts. Trees grew wild and untamed in the yards. Grass swayed long. From a certain angle, it was as if the houses were old wooden ships sinking in an ocean of green, their exteriors pitted with holes that might have been barnacles. Was it something on the houses clicking? Dislodged guttering? Loose clapboards? Her eyes lingered: she could look inside them if she really wanted to find the source of the noise, and maybe there would be supplies too. But, hard as it was to explain, she didn’t want to. Something about the island, its ruin, its crushing sense of loneliness, was written into it. It was as if tragedy was chained to every empty property, like a ghost.
She moved inside the forecourt building.
There were two rooms.
The first looked out at the pumps, where there was a sliding window, a counter, a cash register, and some metal shelves stacked thinly with goods.
Oil. Brake fluid. Antifreeze.
No food or water.
Rebekah moved further in and saw, on a shelf under the counter, an old manual credit-card imprinter, and a pile of carbon receipts. She’d found a similar one in the general store. It made perfect sense out here: with no phone lines, there was no wired internet, and outside Helena, the cellphone signal was patchy. A digital card reader would have been useless.
Backing out, she moved into the second room.
It was larger but equally plain, a desk in one corner, a huge bookcase in the other, its shelves weighed down with manuals and reference tomes about everything from cars to aeroplanes. To Rebekah’s surprise, the rest of the room had been turned into a bedroom-cum-kitchen: a torn mattress lay on top of a bed frame; next to that a cardboard box doubled as a nightstand; there was a lamp, a fold-out camping table, an old television, a DVD player and a stack of discs. Beyond all of those there was a portable closet, the front zipped up, and a rusty outside grill that had obviously been brought inside for the winter.
Rebekah stared at the bed, at the books, at the pile of action movies, and wondered why a person would choose to live like this, in such isolation, for seven months every year. Maybe it’s not the same person who comes back, she thought, but even if the person manning the gas station changed for every new season, this must have been a tough existence. On many days, even in June and July, when the island might get some day-trippers coming to see the whales, or between August and October when the fishermen arrived to trawl for salmon, it was likely the person manning the gas station wouldn’t see anyone. How did they bear it? Why would they want to? Were they escaping something back home? Or were they drawn to the island for some other reason?
Did this place harbour a secret?
She stood ther
e for a while, thinking of her own secrets, her home – then switched her attention back to the portable closet. She unzipped it. Inside, all the clothes were male – a set of dark overalls, a couple of old wool sweaters, two T-shirts, oil-stained pants.
It would do. She could now wash all the clothes she’d been wearing for six days and not have to sit naked as they dried. She took the sweaters, T-shirts and pants off the hangers, then turned her attention to a red switch on a white plate, just inside the door. A ribbon of masking tape had been stuck under it, with ‘GEN’ written on it.
She felt a flutter of excitement and flicked it down.
There was a clunk somewhere in the walls, a sound like an old engine firing up, and the lights buzzed into life. She rushed through to the room at the front and looked at the pumps.
The readouts had blinked and reset.
It works.
Something actually works.
She hurried out, popped open the Jeep’s gas cap, and grabbed the nozzle from the pump. For a second, she held it just short of the Jeep, scared that it wouldn’t work after all, nervous about even trying. But then she inserted the nozzle and squeezed the trigger.
Gas hummed beneath her hands.
She smiled, saw her reflection in the pump’s readout, felt crazy for finding such joy in the simple act of pumping gas, but hung on to it. Since that first night, there had been so few of these moments.
Afterwards, when the tank was full, she headed back inside to switch off the generator – and, as she exited, something caught her eye.
She’d almost missed it.
It was on a shelf, above her eyeline, obscured behind some oil containers. She dragged a stool out from under the counter, climbed onto it and shifted the oil to one side.
There, hidden, was what looked like a cellphone from the nineties.
Except it wasn’t.
It was a handheld radio.
Before
For the first couple of months, Gareth lived out of a suitcase in a Jersey hotel. He would call Rebekah every night, or he would text, but whenever she saw his number flash up, she ignored it.
In response, he started coming to the house.
He’d stand there on the front steps, jabbing at the buzzer until she was forced to answer the door, worried that the noise would wake the girls.
‘You’ve got to stop this, Gareth,’ she said one night, three weeks after he’d moved out. His car was parked awkwardly against the kerb, the front tyre almost mounting it, and he looked like he’d just crawled out of bed.
‘Please, Bek.’ His eyes glistened.
Please take me back.
In spite of herself, she felt a flicker of anguish for him. ‘You made your choice, Gareth.’ She swallowed her emotion. ‘This is your fault.’
‘I know,’ he said, beaten down, defeated. ‘I know.’
‘You can see the girls any time, I’ve told you that, but only when you stop calling me all day, every day. I don’t want to keep picking up my phone and finding a hundred missed calls from you, asking for forgiveness. If you want to see the girls, that’s when you text or call me. That’s how it’s got to work now. You text or call and we arrange a time. Is that clear?’
He nodded.
She pushed the door shut and stood there, listening to his footsteps fade away. Then, although she fought the urge, she began to sob uncontrollably.
The new arrangement worked for a few weeks, and whenever he came to the house to see the girls, she tried to leave him alone with them. But the more time he spent with them, and the more times he returned to the house, the angrier he seemed to get.
A month and a half in, on a steamy night in the middle of May, he turned up just before midnight, stinking of booze, and barged inside the brownstone, demanding to see the girls, even though he’d spent a couple of hours with them earlier in the day.
This time, it was easier for Rebekah to maintain control of herself. ‘What the hell are you doing, Gareth?’
‘What does it look like?’ he slurred, stumbling into the hallway, his arm pressed flat against one of the walls for support.
‘You’re drunk. No way are you going upstair–’
‘They’re my girls,’ he spat, and headed for the staircase. As Rebekah followed, telling him to keep his voice down, she thought of all the times over the weeks and months leading up to their split when Gareth had got home and never bothered to look in on his daughters. By the time she got to their room, she could feel the anger like heat on her skin. But then she watched him stand by the girls’ beds, dropping to his haunches as they slept, taking their tiny hands in his, and couldn’t bring herself to say anything. To do so, to shout and scream at him, to wake the girls and scare them, would have been to destroy the sanctity of the room. The animals on the mobile, gently turning above Chloe’s head. The fairies dancing across the wallpaper where Kyra slept. Her pink giraffe, on the floor already.
So she left him there and went downstairs, and when he finally emerged, she was in the living room, waiting for him. He paused in the hallway, peering in at her, like a spirit haunting a place where it didn’t belong. It made her wonder what he would look like after three months, or six. Would he be an even paler reflection of the man he’d once been? Or was this just a stage for him, just a stopping-off point on a journey that would end in more resentment?
‘Thank you,’ he said.
They stood there, staring at each other.
And then he left.
As it turned out, things got better, not worse: Gareth stopped drinking and they began to get into a routine, and in early June, he found an apartment only four blocks from the house. Rebekah prepared herself for when he’d begin resenting the arrangements, for bitterness and blazing rows, but it never happened. If anything, finding the apartment, and Rebekah allowing him to take the girls out whenever he called to arrange it, seemed to galvanize him. He picked up Kyra and Chloe, always had them back on time, and Rebekah never had to argue with him about financial support.
In the background, there was always the unspoken subject of divorce, the tension as to who would broach it first or move them closer towards a lawyer’s office – but they never quite got there. And the longer they existed like that, in a separated partnership that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow did, the more Rebekah let the rest of her life pull into focus. She went out for a drink occasionally with Noella. She went to the cinema a couple of times with Johnny. She saw friends for coffee while Gareth babysat, and she picked up more locum work. By the middle of September, six months on from their split, she and Gareth were still making it work. As odd as their set-up was, Rebekah felt as if she’d recaptured a little joy.
That was when her friend Kirsty Cohen called her.
And that was when Rebekah made a terrible mistake.
19
She powered the handheld radio on in the front room of the gas station. Please work. Please work. It did: the screen turned orange and the words ‘FLOATING VHF’ blinked a couple of times in the middle.
I’ve got a radio.
‘I’ve got a radio,’ she repeated out loud, frantic with excitement.
A big number 16 appeared on the left-hand side of the screen, a series of tiny icons on the right, and the kind of signal bar that a cellphone would carry at the bottom. The signal had greyed-out space for five bars, but only three were filled black. Did that mean she had reception?
Did VHF radios even work that way?
She looked at the buttons under the screen. An up and down arrow. An icon that looked like the Reload Page button on a web browser. Half-circles with ‘CALL ENT SET UP’ in one, and ‘MEM ESC’ in the other. One with 16/9 in it, and three more under that: ‘WX’, ‘H-M-L’ and ‘SCAN’. She had no idea what most of it was shorthand for – but she knew what ‘SCAN’ meant.
She pushed it.
The screen dissolved and Scanning … appeared. Rebekah stared at it, not moving an inch in case the slightest change of position affected the signal
. The wait was excruciating, the dots after Scanning disappearing and refilling one after another on repeat. Come on, she thought, come on, please, willing it to find something, anything – a channel someone else was using, a voice, a person she could talk to, just the vaguest hint of another human being.
The screen returned to how it had been.
‘What?’ She stared at it. ‘What happened?’
She pressed ‘SCAN’ again.
This time she placed the radio on the counter, thinking that her hand couldn’t have been steady enough. She leaned over it, watching the dots fill in and vanish, fill in and vanish. She tried not to bargain with it this time, tried not to will it to find something, in case she’d cursed it the first time around. In the seconds after that thought arrived, she realized its insanity: that a piece of plastic could be bargained with, that it might choose to play games with her.
The screen reset again.
‘Shit.’
The signal icon had gone down from three to two bars – but if it worked like a cellphone that should still be enough to get a signal, surely.
She picked it up and looked at the top.
There was a dial marked CHANNEL.
She turned it one way and saw the number on the screen decrease to 1. In the other direction, it went up to 26. Double-checking that the volume was definitely on, she began cycling through each channel, stopping at every one.
Static.
She did it again, stopping for longer, giving each channel at least a minute. For almost half an hour, she simply went from channel to channel, waiting, and then, when she got no hits, no voices, she went back through them again. This time, halfway through, on channel 16, she heard something different: static, just the same as the others – but then a hint of a voice.
Words.
