by Tim Weaver
Indecipherable, but there.
She almost dropped the radio as she scrambled to reply. Bringing it up to her ear, she pressed the button on the side: there was nothing but static again now. She didn’t let it deter her: ‘Hello? Hello, is anybody there?’ Clearing her voice, she tried again: ‘Please. My name is –’
She stopped.
Should she give her name? She didn’t know who the hell was on the other end. What if it was him?
What if it was the man with the green eyes?
Her mind went back to the forest, to the mound of freshly dug earth under the shadow of the exposed tree roots. Now she was hesitating, unsure whether to use the radio again.
But then she thought, What if it really is a rescue boat?
She had to take the chance.
She had to know.
‘I’m calling you,’ she said, and ground to a halt again. Calling? Is that what they’d say on these things? She decided it didn’t matter. For now, she just needed to get the message out that she was trapped. No name, just details. She could suss it out from there. ‘Please. If anyone can hear me, I need help.’
She let go of the button on the side.
Waited. Nothing.
‘Please,’ she said again, pressing the speaker to her lips, gripping the handset tighter than she’d held on to anything in her life. ‘If you can hear this, I need help. I’m trapped here. I can’t get home. I need help!’
Again, she waited.
The static growled, just the same as before.
But, then, something else.
She tried to tune out the rain on the forecourt roof, the distant crash of the sea.
‘… for the …’
Two words.
She grabbed it again. ‘Hello? Hello?’
She let go of the button.
Static.
No other voices. No words.
‘Hello?’ she said, for what felt like the hundredth time. ‘This is an SOS. Please, someone, help me! SOS! This is an SOS! Please. SOS!’
All that came back was the same wall of noise.
But then: ‘… westerly … a position …’
Did the voice say, a position?
Or her position?
She glanced at the handset, at the channel number. Had she just given herself away? Panic plunged through her chest. It could really be him. Green Eyes. He could have been waiting for this. He could be listening out for anything to do with me and Johnny.
She looked at the signal: it was still on only two bars.
Could that be why his voice kept fading in and out?
She rushed outside, onto the forecourt, holding the radio up in front of her. She did a circle of the building, trying to improve the signal, and, to her surprise, found something entirely different: a black, mud-spattered Ford Explorer – old and up on bricks – half concealed by weeds and scrub. She climbed into the bed of the truck and held the radio above her head.
Still two bars.
‘Please,’ she said, trying to speak clearly, slowly, ‘if you can hear me, I need help. I got left behind here. Please come and help me.’ And then, as she shouted, ‘SOS!’ over and over, she got the hint of another response.
Words, barely intelligible, but there.
‘… westerly … land …’
Land – or island?
Frustrated, Rebekah looked around.
In the distance, she could see Nuyáhshá.
She needed to get to higher ground.
20
Rebekah ran as fast as she could.
Nuyáhshá was only the height of a ten-storey building, but it seemed bigger because it was wide, a sprawling mound of grass, trees and mud trails.
On the eight-minute drive from the gas station, she tried the handset repeatedly – but she didn’t pick up a hint of anything else. As she climbed, she started to feel the hopelessness of her search for life at the other end of a radio wave, but she pushed forward, struggling to breathe, hot – almost feverish – in all the layers she still had on.
Near the top, as the trail steepened, her lungs burning, images flooded her of when she had run for her school, when this would have been easy for her. It felt like another life. She battled to even recognize that girl.
At the top, the trail went through one final switchback before levelling out into what would once have been a picnic area. There were no trees up here, just a couple of wooden benches, coloured by old graffiti and scarred by names, hearts and messages. Rebekah looked at some of the dates: the marks were all made before 1985, some as far back as the early sixties. It seemed to underline how far the island had fallen: once, it had been a magnet for vacationers from all down the east coast; now it was just a phantom haunting the ocean.
Rebekah stopped, looking in all directions.
The ground under her feet was made up of concrete slabs, which rocked as she shifted her weight. She had an uninterrupted view of the ocean, a three-sixty-degree outlook from which she could see nothing but the grey Atlantic, and then – just a vague silhouette – the greyer outline of the mainland to the north. It was only a hundred and one miles away. A hundred miles was the distance she used to drive to Mike’s house and back when he lived in White Plains. Now, though, as she stared out at the vastness of the sea, its surface completely unblemished by boats, a hundred and one miles seemed millennia away. It was too far for her to see any landmarks in Montauk.
She glanced at the radio.
Still two bars.
Hitting the button on the side, she said the same words yet again: ‘I need help. Please, is anybody out there?’ She stopped, listening.
Crushing, relentless static.
She looked at the 16 on the display. That was the one it had been set to when she’d powered on the handset. Did that mean it was the best channel for making contact? Could it be the emergency channel?
She only knew about emergency channels because she’d read about them once, or maybe seen something on TV. I wish you were here, Dad. You’d know how this thing works. Clouds scudded overhead, the wind picked up and died away, and she started cycling through all twenty-six channels again.
After almost an hour, she finally stopped.
Tears filled her eyes as she tried pressing all the buttons, tried swivelling the volume up and down, a last defiant move full of fury and frustration.
‘Fuck!’
She launched the radio down the hill, watched it tumble and come to rest. It had been a stupid thing to do, but she stood where she was and let herself cry, before she trudged down, in the diminishing light, to pick up the radio again.
By the time she’d got back to the car, night was swarming over the island. She sat with the engine running, staring into the blackness, then headed back on the road she’d come in on. It wasn’t until she passed the gas station and the dilapidated homes that the full, destructive weight of what she’d achieved – or hadn’t – after six full days on the island hit her like a punch to the throat: she had a radio, but didn’t know how to use it; she had a roof over her head, but didn’t have any electricity; she had food, but it would run out long before the island reopened; she had spare clothes, but they were too big and would impede her movement.
Suddenly even the tiny victories felt like failures.
It was almost a week since she’d left home and there was no way her and Johnny’s absence would have gone unnoticed. Johnny’s boss at the store, his colleagues there, his friends, wouldn’t have been able to get hold of him. And either Noella or Gareth would definitely have reported them missing. Rebekah not coming back to her girls was completely out of character. What reason would they have not to report her disappearance?
But when the question landed, it landed hard: she couldn’t think of a reason why Noella wouldn’t contact the cops, but it was easier to imagine why Gareth wouldn’t, easier to imagine how he might benefit if Rebekah never made it home. As well as they’d been doing since the split, with Rebekah out of the picture the girls would be entirely his. He’d
have sole custody. No more turning up at the brownstone at prearranged times. No court appearance when he and Rebekah finally decided to make things official. No chance that a judge might do something unpredictable in a settlement, like restricting Gareth’s access to the girls.
It would be so straightforward.
But was he really capable of thinking like that? And even if he was, why wouldn’t Noella go to the cops? As that second question lingered in Rebekah’s thoughts, there was a brief moment when she and Gareth were back in the kitchen as Gareth admitted to cheating on her, and Rebekah realized something about that day, and all the days and weeks afterwards: she’d never asked for the name of the woman he’d been seeing. She’d never wanted it.
What if it was Noella?
Her stomach dropped.
It wasn’t Noe. It can’t have been.
But although she tried to push the idea away, she couldn’t let go of it. Because now all she could think about was something Noe had said to her in the days before Gareth’s confession: Gareth’s a good-looking guy. He’s confident, he’s charming. It’s time you knew the truth – about him, and about the woman he’s seeing. And as the idea of Gareth and Noella ossified, the reality of Rebekah’s situation hit home.
Maybe there wasn’t going to be any rescue.
Home
At the end of the day, Frank Travis drove back to his place in Queens. It was a narrow home with red-brick steps up to the front door and a clapboard finish on the ground floor. Whenever he pulled onto the driveway and switched off the engine, he could see the echoes of the family that had once lived here. It had been four years since Mark had got a job on the west coast, two and a half since Gaby had gone to college, and many more since Naomi had told Travis she didn’t want to be with him anymore, yet the reminders of them all remained.
Inside, the kitchen felt the same as it always did: in all the time he’d been living here, he’d barely changed a thing, not only because the cabinets and countertops were fine but because there were memories in all of it. A scratch next to the sink where, as a teenager, Mark hadn’t used a cutting board. A hollow impression in the drywall where the kids had been fighting. Tiny pen marks, all the way up the door frame, where Travis had measured their heights every year until, suddenly, they were adults and gone. One of the many reasons Naomi had given for leaving – other than a two-year affair – was Travis’s total lack of interest in maintaining the house. But the truth was, Travis wasn’t disinterested in home improvement, or incapable, it had just never seemed important. At the end of every shift, he was beat, mentally and physically, his head filled with images he’d have given anything not to carry, so the idea of pouring the same energy into hanging a blind just didn’t compute. In all his years as a cop, he’d never been able to forget what he saw on the job. So when he got home, all he ever cared about was hugging his kids.
Upstairs, he showered and changed, and then – as the snow started to fall again outside – he grabbed his cell and sent messages to Mark and Gaby. Mark was working in LA, doing something with video games that Travis didn’t understand; Gaby was in her final year at Northwestern studying drama.
Once the texts were sent, he went to his voicemail and finally listened to the message Naomi had left him earlier. ‘It’s me,’ she said, the sing-song quality of her South Carolina accent deliberately subdued. ‘You still owe me the money for Gaby’s last semester. I cut you some slack because I know you’re struggling financially –’ she pitched those last five words as exactly what they were: a putdown ‘– but my patience only stretches so far, Frank. You owe me that money. Don’t force me to give Nat Stramer a call.’
Nat Stramer was her lawyer.
She was part of the reason Travis was still a detective, even into his fifty-ninth year: he’d originally retired at forty-five, after twenty-four years on the force, and had taken his pension while working a second career in security. But then the security firm had gone bankrupt and Naomi filed for divorce. A year after that, thanks to the efforts of Nat Stramer, Travis was ordered to pay his ex-wife one-half of the amount that his pension fund had accrued during the time they were married, and that was why he’d returned to the NYPD – just not in Homicide this time, in Missing Persons.
His cellphone buzzed, a message from Gaby popping up.
Hey Dad. All good here. You wanna chat? x
He dialled her straight back. ‘Hey, kiddo,’ he said, when she answered. ‘I don’t want to stop you if you’re in the middle of something,’ but the second he said it, he thought, Please don’t be in the middle of something. He wanted to talk to her. He missed both of his kids desperately.
‘No, it’s cool, Dad. What you up to?’
‘Oh, not much,’ he said, relieved. ‘Just chilling out at home. I can’t wait to see you over Christmas.’
‘Me too. Are you by yourself tonight?’
‘No, I’ve got some friends coming over later,’ he lied, because he knew if he told her he was alone again, she’d worry, and he didn’t need her mind on anything but the last months of her degree.
Even so, Gaby said, ‘I worry about you in that house by yourself. Why don’t you let me set you up on a dating site? You’d be a great catch.’
‘That’s sweet, honey.’
‘I mean it. I just want you to be happy.’
Seven words that stopped him dead.
He swallowed, suddenly overwhelmed by her comment, the kindness in it. He thought of all the times he’d sat on the porch in the backyard and watched Gaby and her brother play, and the moments in their teens, even as they’d argued with him, even as they’d stormed off after a fight, when Travis would think, I don’t want them to get any older. I don’t want them to leave. My kids and my work, they’re all I have. It’s all I am.
Maybe it’s all I’ll ever be.
The woman stared at the television without really taking in what was on. In her hands she played with a photograph, moving it between her fingers.
‘You want some more wine?’
Axel’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts.
‘No,’ she replied, still moving the photograph in her fingers. She could see Axel looking more closely at her now, at the picture she was holding. ‘I’m good,’ she said. ‘You go on to bed if you like.’
Axel nodded, but didn’t move.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he asked her. She looked at him properly this time, and he must have seen the answer, because as soon as he did, he was nodding again. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, then.’
She watched him go, watched him look back at her from the bottom of the stairs, worry in his face, and then he ascended into the darkness. She listened to him moving around above her, floorboards creaking, and then her attention returned to the photograph she was holding.
Taken on the front steps of a house in south Brooklyn, maybe ten years ago, it was a snapshot of a family.
A father.
His two sons.
And his daughter.
Before
Rebekah first met Kirsty Cohen at Columbia, where they’d both been on the same biology course. She was a sparky redhead who loved to go dancing, and they hit it off straight away. They had the same sense of humour, which made it easy, but there were other similarities too: Kirsty also came from a male-dominated family, except she had four older brothers, and two were already doctors, one a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins. Sometimes, when Kirsty’s family came into town, Rebekah would feel intimidated and embarrassed to talk about her own, much as it pained her to feel that way: for three decades, Kirsty’s mom and dad had jointly run a huge advertising agency in the city, and whenever they asked Rebekah about her parents, about her brothers, she would tell them her mother had died when she was still young, that Mike had been a successful app developer before his accident, and that Johnny was a writer of historical fiction. Only one part of that was accurate, and the guilt would eat at her afterwards, but it felt less disappointing than the truth.
Th
e two women barely left one another’s side until graduation, when Rebekah decided to stay on in New York to go to medical school at NYU, and Kirsty moved to Baltimore, following her brother’s path to Johns Hopkins. As unlikely as it might once have seemed, eventually they stopped talking as often. But not entirely: over the years, they kept in touch by text and email – not frequently, but enough – and, every so often, whenever Kirsty was back in the city seeing her parents, they would meet up.
That was why they got together in the middle of September: Kirsty called and told Rebekah that three of the girls they’d been at Columbia with were all going to be in the city at the same time for the weekend, and she was thinking of organizing a reunion tour. ‘Of New York’s bars,’ she joked over the phone.
‘I’m a lightweight these days,’ Rebekah responded.
Kirsty burst out laughing. ‘Don’t give me that shit, Murphy. You’re Irish.’ She’d always called her Murphy, even after Rebekah had married Gareth and changed her name. ‘I’ll ping you over the details.’
So, on a humid Saturday evening, Gareth came to babysit the girls, and Rebekah got an Uber into the city. Kirsty had booked a table at a burger joint on the corner of 114th and Broadway, where the five of them had gone all the time when they were students, and while it had been given a hipster makeover, and the burgers were now twice as expensive as they were in 2002, they still did peanut butter shakes, and the women still got to sit at the same window booth.
After they were done eating, they took another Uber south to the Renaissance on Broadway because one of the women knew the manager at the hotel bar and reckoned she could get them a round of free drinks. After watching her flirt outrageously for five minutes, to Rebekah’s surprise it worked, and they grabbed a table with incredible views of Times Square, its billboards painting the night.
They left at about 11 p.m., after five more rounds, all of them drunk or most of the way there. Back in college, Rebekah had always been able to hold her liquor the best, and it seemed to her that was still the case, so when Kirsty came up with a plan to go to the Zee Club on 45th Street, Rebekah ran point, buzzed enough to think that doing a posh English accent would help convince the bouncers to let them jump the queue. It helped more that the five of them were attractive so, inside, they bought more drinks, then headed for the dancefloor.
