The corridor of paper wasn’t Rebekah’s only project.
She also started running again.
She used a pair of jogging pants that Stelzik had brought with him, one of his T-shirts, and the old woollen sweater she’d found in the gas station.
To begin with, she could manage a mile and a half, which wouldn’t even have been a warm-up for her in her youth. But gradually, as the days and weeks passed, she got faster, going longer distances, running on the deserted, frost-peppered roads, knowing she had to get faster and stronger.
At the beginning of March, she cut her hair short, sitting in front of the mirror in Stelzik’s room with a blunt pair of scissors she’d found in one of the kitchen drawers. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. It made running easier because her hair no longer got in her face when the wind picked up, and from there, she pushed herself further: on Sundays, she would run the entirety of the Loop – all twenty-three miles of it – because it made her feel in control of something, powerful and purposeful. For three and a half hours, she wasn’t thinking about anything else. When she ran, she was just moving forward – and with one solitary goal in mind.
She needed to be unbreakable once the island reopened.
Sometimes, when she got back to the hostel, she could hear the echoes of her father, as if his voice were in the wind; she could picture her and Mike in the front yard of their place on 81st Street after they’d finished a run, and see their dad standing on the porch repeatedly telling Mike to stretch properly. ‘If you don’t stretch,’ he would say, ‘I promise you’ll be walking like John Wayne in the morning,’ and then Mike would stretch half-heartedly, and the next day, like clockwork, he’d come down to the breakfast table pretending everything was normal, even though he could barely move.
She upped her running again in March, going even further, making use of the milder weather, and the candy bars in the store for energy. She knew she needed to change herself, and prepare for what was coming. And the more she ran, the more it helped her focus when she returned to the hostel. Her heart pounding in her chest, her clothes soaked with sweat, she would sometimes sit and look at the paper she’d stuck to the wall of the corridor – mismatched and overlapping, sticky tape everywhere, scrawled, untidy writing that only she could understand – before she did anything else, including stretching. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she’d say quietly, her routine pushed aside so she could study everything she’d collated.
Very quickly, the ‘why’ became the most important part of the corridor, the area she spent most time in, and the area she continued to add to. And within the ‘why’ section was the area she focused on most of all.
To a stranger, it would look like an untidy waterfall of names.
To Rebekah, it was a suspect list.