Between the houses, halfway back to the car, as she took a step to her right to avoid a loose piece of clapboard rattling in the wind, the toe of Rebekah’s sneaker glanced off something.
She stopped and looked down.
It was half concealed in the grass.
Dropping to her haunches, she picked it up. It was a dirty wallet, the leather washed-out, a bifold design that fell open in her hands to reveal a horizontal pocket, three empty credit card slots and a window for a photograph. There were two dollar bills inside and a driver’s licence, long expired. There were some business cards too, old and creased.
Paul Connors.
Mechanic – East Hampton/Montauk.
In the window was a picture of a young family – the man who must have been Paul Connors, then a woman, in their late thirties, and two angelic kids: a boy and a girl, both of them white-blond.
They were all standing in front of a black Ford Explorer.
Steve.
She felt a tremor in her throat as she slid out Connors’ driver’s licence. It was three years past its expiration date, lost here for all that time. He was thirty-eight. He’d been six two, 190 pounds, and had blue eyes, the same as his children. He was listed as a veteran and an organ donor.
He hadn’t battled to have kids.
His name wasn’t Steve.
Deep down, Rebekah had never believed any of those things were true, but saying them, playing around with them in her head, had been a way to anchor her to some kind of normality. Steve had been a step away from the abnormality of her existence. He had been her ballast.
But now he was gone.
Just like Roxie.
Just like everyone else in her life.
Her eyes searched the empty road as she crossed the Loop, back towards the gas station, silently willing Roxie to reappear. When that failed, she started calling her name again.
It was hopeless.
After a while, she started to doubt herself. Had she really seen Roxie? What did it mean if she hadn’t? Could she be going mad? Could this be the beginning of some mania, brought on by the seclusion, and the silence?
She looked to the Ford Explorer, but there were no answers there, and as she got to the Cherokee, its door still open, she stared at her reflection in the windshield. It was like gazing into the face of a stranger, her eyes smeared with the weight of so much time alone, the skin on her face carved so close to the bone, it was like she was shrinking.
‘You’re losing it,’ she said softly.
Her reflection mouthed the same words back to her, which seemed to break the spell. As she got back into the car and pulled the door closed, then started the engine, she thought of the famous quote about insanity, about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That was what she’d been doing as she called for Roxie. For twenty minutes, she’d just repeated a name.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
And then, from the back seat: a noise.
It took her a second to find the source. Rebekah looked down, into the space behind the passenger seat.
Two eyes – one swollen shut – looked up at her.