by Tim Weaver
‘I’m serious, Johnny.’
They all stared at him, taken aback, the smile gone from their father’s face. Mike stared at his beer bottle, condensation running down it.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Rebekah said to him, annoyed at her brother’s sudden turn, cranky from the shift, from the fatigue of carrying around twenty-six pounds of extra weight.
‘What the hell’s the matter with me?’ He looked up from the bottle, and his eyes shimmered briefly in the dull light of the restaurant. ‘I went out with her for six months and you don’t remember her. How can that be right?’
‘Why does Alice matter so much, son?’ Their father spoke softly, his thin, veined hand moving across the table to Mike’s.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mike said quietly.
‘What are you sorry about?’ their father replied.
Rebekah saw the same reaction in Johnny and Mike that she felt in herself: a memory stirring, a shape awakening in the dark. As kids, their father would say that to them when they’d done something wrong. He’d forgo telling them off for a prolonged, disappointed silence, and when they finally returned to him to apologize, he’d always pose the same question.
What are you sorry about?
‘She died today,’ Mike said, almost a whisper.
‘Damn,’ Johnny responded. ‘I’m sorry, buddy.’
Mike looked up at him. ‘She jumped off a building.’
‘Shit.’ Rebekah gasped. ‘I’m so sorry, Mike.’
‘She called me up out of the blue about a week ago, and I could barely even remember her.’ Mike had now removed the label from his bottle. He started folding it on the table, creating smaller and smaller squares. ‘I think she was calling up anyone who’d ever hurt her,’ he said, his voice like a low hum. ‘I hurt her, and I barely even remember her.’
‘You’re not responsible for what she did,’ Johnny said.
‘Maybe I am, John.’
‘No, Mikey. You can’t go through life wondering if every single decision you made is going to have repercussions for someone ten years down the line.’
‘Johnny’s right, son,’ their father said.
But it wasn’t the answer Mike wanted – or not one that brought him any comfort. ‘I don’t want to be the type of person who just forgets the people who pass through their life,’ he said, and in that second, Rebekah recalled thinking that she’d never seen her brother so shorn of bravado, so burdened by an act, a choice, its consequence. ‘I’ve got to start making more of the moments I get. I don’t want to be a person who forgets what’s important.’
When she picked up the phone the next morning, Rebekah was still thinking about that evening, about what Mike had said to them, about what she had promised herself in the aftermath of her night out with Kirsty. I need to forget about strangers. It’s time to concentrate on the ones I love.
‘Bek?’ Johnny said, when he answered his cell. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve just been thinking a lot about Dad, and Mike, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time you and I spent more than an hour together. Just the two of us, I mean. I think it might have been the day of Dad’s funeral when we drove to Union Beach. You remember that?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘That’s almost two years ago.’
She thought of what Mike had said at the diner: I’ve got to start making more of the moments I get. Except he’d never really got the chance. Two weeks later, he was dead. But Rebekah was still here, and so was Johnny.
‘I’ve asked Noe to have the girls on Saturday,’ she said.
A confused pause. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your trip to Crow Island in two days time.’ Rebekah paused, looking at Chloe in a bouncer at her feet, at Kyra playing with her blocks. ‘Why don’t we go together?’
That night, after she’d put Chloe down and spent fifteen minutes with Kyra while she played with Johnny’s snowglobe, Kirsty called again. As she watched her cell shimmy across the living-room table, Rebekah felt annoyed at her friend’s persistence. She didn’t want to talk about the night out they’d all had.
She didn’t want to talk about what had happened.
It wasn’t fun gossip to Rebekah.
After the phone had stopped ringing, she saw that a voicemail had been left. Rebekah thought about ignoring it, or deleting it. But Kirsty’s calls would never stop coming until she rang her back.
She played the voicemail.
‘Uh, hi, Murphy, it’s me. I, uh … It’s awkward. I just …’ She stopped, the line filled with nothing but silence. ‘I wanted to talk to you about someone.’
And then she told Rebekah who.
The Call
As Travis dozed in front of the television, his phone started buzzing. It took him a second to get his bearings, even though he’d been aware of the TV in the background the whole time, the dull sound of cars out on the street, dogs barking, planes heading south to JFK and into LaGuardia. He scrambled around for his eyeglasses – he’d got into the habit of wearing them whenever he answered a call, just in case he needed to write something down – then scooped up his phone.
It was Amy Houser.
‘Ames?’ He checked the time. It was 1 a.m. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m good, Trav.’
She was still at the office: he could hear phones, voices, the sounds of a squad room, and then he remembered she’d told him earlier that she was working late this week. ‘I might have something for you,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That case you were talking about earlier.’
‘Louise Mason?’
‘Yeah, the artist.’ Houser paused, her movement and the crackle of the line reverberating back to him. ‘The phone kept ringing on your desk tonight – like, incessantly. I was starting to get real pissed, as was everyone else on my team – I mean, we both know nights are bad enough without phones still going like it’s nine a.m. – so, eventually, I walked over and tried to switch the damn thing off. But then it started ringing again. So, I thought, What the hell?’
Something big was coming.
Travis could feel it.
‘Who was the caller?’ he asked.
‘Male. That’s all I know. I came right out the gate and asked him if he was the one who kept calling. He said he was. I said, “If you want to speak to someone on the Missing Persons Squad, you’re gonna have to call back in the morning.” But he wasn’t looking for a conversation. He just said, “I heard he was searching for the artist. Tell him to take a second look at the boyfriend.”’
Travis felt a surge of electricity.
‘“Him” being you, it would seem,’ Houser added.
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘Nope. Straight after that, he hung up.’
Travis grabbed his notebook.
‘Why wouldn’t he call you in office hours?’ Houser said.
‘Because he didn’t want me to answer.’
Houser paused. ‘That makes no sense.’
‘It does if he thinks I might recognize his voice.’
Travis whipped through the pages of his notebook until he got to a section at the front that dealt with the guy Louise had been seeing before she’d disappeared. The boyfriend. Travis had dismissed him early on because he’d had a rock-solid alibi: he’d left her at the fundraiser early to head to the ER because a close family friend had been taken ill; later that night, he’d messaged her from the hospital to apologize, but by then her cellphone had gone dead. But what if this boyfriend had lied?
‘Trav?’
‘I really appreciate this, Ames.’
‘Sure.’
Travis hung up, then started rereading the notes he’d made after interviewing the boyfriend first time around, back in October. When he was done, he retreated a few pages to the guy’s personal details. His DOB, social security number, employment history and criminal record.
Except
there wasn’t a record.
There wasn’t much of anything.
Johnny Murphy was spotlessly clean.
3
* * *
THE PRISON
26
Rebekah hardly slept for a week.
Whenever she shut her eyes, the walls of the store would close in and she’d be back at the beach. She’d be looking at Hain and Lima as they talked about how they were going to come back on 1 April to find her body and bury it. But what would happen when they couldn’t find her?
She spent days thinking about it, turning things over in her head, the different reactions they might have. She was awake for so long, she began to lose her focus and clarity, and in her exhaustion, her thoughts became more irrational, more naïve, and she began entertaining possibilities, like the two of them forgetting to take the ferry on that first day, or making it over and then getting lost in the forest.
In the dead of night, frightened, confused, alone, the kind of rudimentary mistakes she knew, deep down, they weren’t capable of, began to feel conceivable, even likely. But then, on day twelve, wrapped in blankets from the hostel, Rebekah closed her eyes as the sun set – unable to keep awake any longer – and didn’t stir again until almost eleven the next day.
After that, she was thinking more clearly.
When a search of the forest didn’t turn up her body, Hain and Lima would wonder why. If she returned the Cherokee to the parking lot at Simmons Gully, it might buy her some time, but sooner or later they would realize she was still alive. Lima had made mistakes that day, he’d admitted as much to Hain, so that would help reinforce the idea of her survival. After that, they’d surely head back to the harbour. They’d go there and wait. They’d watch passengers boarding the return ferry at the end of the day. They’d look at every single face until they found the one they’d come for.
Hers.
But then something else struck her. She’d started taking pebbles from a beach on the west coast, one for every day she’d been on the island, collecting them in a pile at the front of the store, not only to remind her of how long she’d been away from home but to help her keep track of time. So far, she had fifteen pebbles for fifteen days. But by the time Hain and Lima came back, by the time the new season rolled around, she’d have 152.
Day 15 to Day 152.
She had to survive another four and a half months.
Depression hit, and it hit hard.
She barely went outside, frightened that somehow Hain and Lima might come back and catch her wandering around. When she did go out – looking for food, for a kerosene heater to warm the freezing-cold store – she never went far, and she was constantly looking over her shoulder, paranoid, on edge, startled by every sound, spooked by every flicker of movement. A week later, she stopped going out at all. She’d clamber onto the counter and just stare at the sea. Sometimes, she would become aware of how unclean she was, the stench of sweat on her skin and in her clothes; she would understand that she was spiralling. Most of the time, though, she didn’t care: she’d just stay there, in the store, staring into space.
Whenever she thought of the girls, she’d crash. She didn’t even have a photo of them to look at. Her purse, where she always kept a picture of the three of them, taken at the market in Prospect Park a month after Chloe was born, had been stolen from the Cherokee by Lima and, by then, he’d already had her cell. She began to worry that she was forgetting them: their eyes, their smiles.
She tried to remember what it felt like to lie next to Kyra, stroking her hair as she dropped off to sleep, and couldn’t. She wasn’t sure if Chloe’s bouncer had been yellow or red. One night, she stayed awake for four hours trying to remember if there were zebras or lions on her mobile. It became so unreasonably important that her skin started to itch. It got so bad her nails ended up tearing open her forearm.
The next day, she trudged out to the car to see if she’d left the Band-Aids in it because she couldn’t find them in the store. She didn’t even bother getting dressed, although the air was like ice: she just went out in her T-shirt, underwear and sneakers. She searched the Jeep and couldn’t find them.
But then she noticed something else.
The date.
When she’d opened the car, it had appeared on the central display, and she’d been so focused on finding the Band-Aids, so adrift in her funk, she hadn’t even noticed. But now she did.
25 November.
Today was Thanksgiving.
Until that moment – until her reflection looked back at her from the windshield – she’d never realized how much like a ghost she’d become, how quickly it had taken hold. But caught there, half dressed, hair a tangled mess, teeth unbrushed, she was so gaunt, so shadowed, she was unrecognizable to herself. When she’d first arrived on the island, she’d still been carrying some weight from her second pregnancy, but after almost a month, it was gone. Her body had become pinched, her skin taut against her bones, and its hue had changed. She’d always had colour before, a gold-brown, like the first hint of fall. Now she was pale and frosted.
She burst into tears at the sight of her image, at the date staring back at her. She imagined the girls eating with Gareth, with Noella, and once she’d pushed that image away, still unwilling to accept it was true, she went over and over what Kyra would be saying about Rebekah not being there, what Chloe would be thinking even though she was still too young to know her mother was gone. It welled like a storm, physically dragging her to the ground, until the images she had of her girls became choppy and disordered, and melted away, like old film.
There, on her knees, she wailed like an injured animal.
She’d finally hit the bottom.
Before
The ferry out to Crow Island left at 8 a.m. It was a three-hour journey, the boat winding its way out of the harbour on Montauk’s north side, east around the Point, then south-east across the Atlantic for one hundred and one miles. Johnny told Rebekah that the island was on the same parallel as Philadelphia, but after a while it became hard to imagine it on the same parallel as anything, because, before long, they were surrounded by nothing but ocean.
Rebekah sat in the passenger lounge and watched land fade from view behind her, the coastline slipping into the sea. It was the penultimate day of the season and the ferry was almost empty. Inside, there were only two other men, one dressed in overalls, the second in oilskins, and then a bored girl, in her late teens, who was manning the concessions stand. Outside, on deck, there was a guy smoking a cigarette whom Rebekah had watched drive a U-Haul truck onto the ferry.
Johnny wove his way back, laptop bag on his shoulder, coffees in hand, a plastic-wrapped cookie in his teeth. ‘Here we go,’ he said, handing Rebekah a cup. He sat down next to her. ‘How are you feeling?’
She watched him unwrap the cookie. It wasn’t the first time she’d left the girls, but it was the first time she’d been so far away from them.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, although the way Johnny looked at her suggested he knew it was a lie. ‘Honestly,’ she added, not wanting to spoil the day before they’d even got there. He’d been so excited about the trip when she’d picked him up that morning, about writing again, at the idea of research and the opportunity to interview a bona-fide expert.
‘Is Noe having the girls all day?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, and then Gareth will look after them tonight.’
‘What time did you say you’d be back?’
‘I didn’t. I’m going to call Noe later, just to check in on how it’s going, and I’ll update her then. We didn’t really have time to get into it this morning.’
Rebekah winked at Johnny, making light of the early start, but it had been stressful and upsetting, and was another reason she felt a little disjointed: to get to Noe for 4.30, and then Johnny’s for 4.50, she’d had to wake both girls from dead sleeps at 4 a.m. They’d hated it, were tired, grumpy, whined almost the entire way over to Noe’s, and Rebekah had had to leave them in floods
of tears to make it to Johnny’s: if she’d been late picking him up, they wouldn’t have had enough time to get across Long Island to Montauk for the eight o’clock ferry.
‘The ferry gets back to Montauk at eight p.m.,’ Johnny said gently, offering Rebekah half a cookie. ‘You should be back home by ten thirty. Ish.’
‘It’s cool,’ Rebekah said. ‘Noe’s brilliant with the girls.’
Johnny sipped his coffee, still looking at her. ‘I really do appreciate this, Bek. All the garbage you’ve gone through this year with Gareth, your job, the girls, all of that, and you can still find time for me.’
Rebekah thought of Mike again, of what he’d said that night in the diner. I’ve got to start making more of the moments I get.
‘I want to be here, Johnny.’ She propped her head against his shoulder and he put his cheek against her hair. ‘So this place shuts tomorrow, right?’
‘Halloween, yeah.’
‘Just like you to wait until the last minute, big brother.’
‘You know me,’ he replied. ‘Always organized.’
‘Always.’
‘So are you and the girls going out trick or treating tomorrow?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ she replied. ‘A whole group of us from the neighbourhood are getting together. Kyra’s very excited. Chloe … I’d say she’s indifferent.’ She smiled. And then she thought of something else: ‘Oh, I almost forgot. Kirsty called me and left a weird message.’
‘Kirsty Cohen?’ Johnny stared at her.
‘She said she wanted to talk to me about someone.’
He frowned.
‘And that someone was you. Any idea why?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Could it be to do with the woman she set you up with?’
‘Louise?’ Johnny looked away from Rebekah, out of one of the windows. ‘I doubt it. I haven’t heard from Louise in weeks.’
‘Oh.’ Rebekah tried to see his face. ‘Sorry, John.’
