For a moment, everything stopped.
‘Hello?’ the voice said again.
‘Gareth?’
A long, agonizing pause.
‘Bek? Bek, is that you?’
‘Yes,’ Rebekah said, elated, unsure, confused about how she felt. The call had rung for so long she’d become certain he would never answer.
Now he had, she didn’t know what to say.
‘Bek? Are you there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m here.’
‘Where the hell have you been?’ His voice wavered, an oscillating lurch between anger and relief. ‘We thought you were dead. You haven’t called, y–’
‘Someone tried to kill me.’
That brought him to an instant halt. ‘What?’
‘Someone tried to kill me,’ she repeated, but the words were getting lost now, disappearing as she struggled to hold back the tears. ‘Johnny and me, we came out to an island, and someone tried to kill us, and I don’t know what happened to John, and I got left behind in this place. I couldn’t get home to …’
She faded out, wiping her eyes.
‘Bek?’
‘I’ve been here alone for five months.’
‘On an island?’
‘Yes, off the coast of Montauk.’
‘Shit, Bek. Are you okay?’ He seemed to realize what a stupid question it was immediately after asking it. ‘I mean, are you hurt? Shall I call the –’
‘I’m okay. The cops are here.’
She glanced at Travis. They’d driven about a mile back down the coast in the direction of Helena, where a jetty crawled out into the ocean. It was the closest point to the lighthouse that the police boats could get to without running aground. Travis had left Rebekah in his rental and walked down to meet the cops.
‘Shit,’ Gareth said again. ‘Bek, I’m so … I can’t believe this …’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Shall I drive out to you or something?’
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll be home soon.’ She sniffed. I’ll be home soon. Even now, it was hard to believe that was true, harder to let herself believe it. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be at work or not,’ she said, and the ordinary nature of the sentence, its absolute banality and how much she’d longed to be able to ask something as simplistic and mundane, brought more tears to her eyes.
‘Bek?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s okay. I got a new job and do afternoons from home now – you know, since you left, uh, since you disapp–’ He stopped himself. He didn’t know how to describe what she’d told him. ‘Since last year. Since last November. The girls go to daycare in the mornings, and I pick them up and bring them back here, and they constantly interrupt me while I’m on conference calls.’ There was humour in his tone, a profound sense of love for their daughters. ‘It’s actually worked out pretty well,’ he added, but then paused, as if he understood how insensitive that might have sounded.
Rebekah thought of the email Gareth had sent Stelzik, of his place on the suspect list, of the questions she wanted answers to – but then it all faded into the background. ‘Can I speak to the girls?’
‘Yeah,’ Gareth said. ‘Yeah, of course.’
‘Are they there?’
‘Yeah, they’re here.’
But now there was hesitation in Gareth’s voice.
‘Yeah,’ he said again. ‘Yeah, just give me a second.’
She heard him put the phone down and shout, ‘Kyra! Kyra, come here, sweetheart!’ And then she heard the faint creak of footsteps, of old floorboards moaning, of Gareth ascending the stairs, and after that there was a hush.
And, in the hush, she knew something for sure.
He’s told them I’m dead.
That was why he’d left the cellphone behind instead of taking it upstairs with him. It was where the hesitation in his voice had come from, the thing that had distracted him. Eventually, maybe two or three months in, with no sign of her or Johnny, no indication of where they’d gone and why they hadn’t come home, he’d realized he had to tell Kyra – because Chloe was still too young – the truth, or some version of it. He had to tell her why her mom wasn’t living with them, why she wasn’t at the breakfast table first thing in the morning – and why she wasn’t there to tuck them in last thing at night.
So he’d told them she was dead.
Because that was what it had looked like.
‘Hello?’
Her voice came out of nowhere.
‘Ky?’
No response.
‘Ky, is that you, baby?’
It was deathly quiet at the other end.
‘Kyra? Kyra?’
Why wasn’t she answering?
She’s not answering because she doesn’t know who I am.
I’m a stranger.
She doesn’t remember my voice.
‘Ky, it’s okay, it’s me. It’s Mummy.’
An even longer, more terrible silence.
‘Ky,’ Rebekah sobbed, ‘you remember Mummy, right?’
Again, there was no sound from the other side, not even the crackle of her daughter’s breath on the line, and this time Rebekah completely fell apart. She leaned forward, against the dash, and everything hit her at once: tears as fierce as every storm that had ripped across the island; abandonment as brutal as every day she’d been alone; pain as real as every cut she’d made in her skin, every bruise, every sprain. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Travis staring at her from the jetty. But there was nothing he could do.
There was nothing anyone could do.
‘Did God send you back?’
Everything stopped for a second time.
‘Ky?’
Rebekah wiped at her eyes, her nose.
‘Did God send you back?’ Kyra repeated, her voice small, reticent, her words edged with an uncharacteristic shyness. But it was her. It was the voice Rebekah had longed to hear every day for 152 days.
‘Yes, baby,’ Rebekah said. ‘God sent me back.’
‘Because Daddy said you were in Heaven.’
She swallowed. ‘I know he did.’
‘Are you still in Heaven?’
She wiped her eyes. ‘No, honey,’ Rebekah said gently. ‘No, I’m not in Heaven any more. I’m on my way back. I’m almost home.’