On 10 March, the gas station ran out of fuel.
Rebekah had never expected there to be enough to last until her final month on the island, but even so, as the lever on the nozzle clicked empty, she felt an acute sense of loss. There were twenty-two days still to go until the ferry came, and during the awful, protracted nightmare of her enforced stay on the island, only the Jeep, her running, and Roxie had brought her any joy at all.
She had enough in the tank to get the car back to the dig site, so – as Roxie sat watching from the back seat, sensing Rebekah was upset – they took the Loop east, pulling off onto the potholed track that took them down to Simmons Gully.
At the bottom, she parked the car where it had been on the final day of the season, turned off the ignition and sat for a while. On the passenger side, the plastic wrap, bound to the door, popped in the wind.
‘I know, Rox. It’s dumb to be upset about a car.’ Rebekah put her hand on Roxie’s head. ‘But …’ For a few short hours every day, as ridiculous as it sounds, being in the car felt like I’d been set free. I had choices.
Small as it was, I had a life.
She got out and started ripping the plastic wrap off the window, then cleared the Jeep of debris, of things she knew hadn’t been left inside on the day she and Johnny came to the island.
Then she and Roxie headed back to the hostel on foot.
Using the bicycle to get around, Rebekah began making repairs to the things she’d broken. Some were beyond fixing – like the padlocks she’d smashed – but she worked around them. She wanted things to look relatively normal for when Hain and Lima docked.
She got rid of the SOS sign she’d painted onto the board at the general store and gathered up all the messages she’d laid out at the harbour with rocks. She got rid of the pile of pebbles she’d been using to count the days off before she moved to the hostel. There was nothing she could do about the boats she’d tried to commandeer: the one with the engine had been carried out about half a mile, and had stayed there ever since; the rowboat had been tossed back into shore by one of the storms, part of its hull smashing as it crashed against the concrete walls of the harbour. She’d tried to drag it up the slipway, but it had been too heavy.
After that, she started preparing a backpack, the essentials she’d need. There were candy bars and bags of chips in the store that still had a couple of months to go before their expiry date, and she dumped a load of them in the side pockets of a bag Stelzik had left in his closet.
She emptied two bottles of Mountain Dew into a sink, and filled them with rainwater, which she’d collected in one of the fishing buckets. She added a first-aid kit, and some freshly washed clothes. They were her clothes, the outfit she’d originally come to the island in. For the trip back, she’d decided to wear Stelzik’s pants and the sweater she’d found at the gas station.
There were two reasons.
Lima knew what she’d been dressed in on the last day of the season – her hoodie, her denims, her sneakers – or, if he didn’t recall exactly, seeing her again would remind him.
And the clothes might act as a disguise. It was part of the reason why Rebekah had cut her hair short. It was why she’d pushed herself so hard with her exercise, running more, using bricks and old pieces of masonry as makeshift weights: she needed to appear bigger and more powerful because she wanted to disappear in plain sight.
She was going to try to pass herself off as a man.