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.