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.