“Maybe. I don’t remember hitting any big bumps or anything, though, so I don’t know how that could have happened.” Cait ducked back into the Jeep and started rummaging around in the glove compartment. Rebecca heard a muffled curse. “No signal,” Cait said, holding up her phone. “What about you?”
Rebecca checked her phone. “Me, neither.”
Cait kept her face neutral, but Rebecca could see the panic in her eyes. “Oh well,” she said, her voice unnaturally high. “We’ll just have to rely on the kindness of strangers. I’m sure someone will come by soon enough.”
Rebecca felt a flicker of fear. This was the person who was responsible for getting her to Albuquerque alive, but right now she looked like a scared little kid struggling to keep it together. She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous.”
“We don’t have a choice. Anyway, flagging someone down can’t be any more dangerous than sitting on the side of the road in the middle of the night, waiting to freeze to death.”
“What if the truck comes back?”
Cait scooped up a few pebbles and tossed them into the brush. “I told you, that was just teenage stuff.”
“What if it wasn’t?”
“What do you want me to say?” Cait snapped. “That we’re fucked? That some ax murderer is going to come down the road any minute and chop us up into little pieces? Is that what you want to hear?” She tossed another pebble, harder this time. “Because I don’t see how that shit is helpful.”
The two women stared at each other, anger pulsing between them like a heartbeat.
Cait held up a hand. “Look, I’m sorry, but—”
Rebecca spun on her heel. “I’m going to see if I can find a signal.” She needed space from the girl, the car, the road. She held the phone up as she walked, waiting for a bar to appear, but it remained stubbornly blank.
She picked her way across the dusty ground, the headlights dimly illuminating scraps of brittlebush and Apache plumes. The landscape was vast and frozen and cast in shades of black and white, like the surface of the moon. The light from the Jeep receded and soon it was just the slivered moon and the vast carpet of pinprick stars lighting her way. She had a sudden near-violent urge to break into a run and keep running out across the vast stretch of frozen dead land, straight on until she fell off the edge onto the other side.
One bright summer morning when she was five years old, she’d gone out into her parents’ small backyard with the plastic bucket and spade her mother had bought for the beach, and she’d started digging. By lunchtime, there was a knee-deep hole in the ground. By afternoon snack, it was up to her waist. She went slowly, crouching beside the pile of scooped dirt and sifting through it for treasure.
Her father had come home from work early that day and found her sitting next to the hole she’d dug. “You dig any farther,” he’d said, ruffling her hair as he headed back into the house, “you’re going to fall out the other side.”
She dug even harder.
That night, she dreamed of falling into the hole like Alice in Wonderland, and waking up in an upside-down world filled with Cheshire Cats and Mad Hatters. In the morning, she ran outside to find the hole filled in and the dirt tamped down tightly across it. She burst into tears.
Her father heard her and came outside to comfort her. “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself,” he’d said, placing an arm around her thin shoulders.
She’d turned her tear-streaked face to his. “But now I’ll never see what’s on the other side.”
That’s what she wanted to do now: reach the edge of the world and launch herself off the precipice. She could feel the plummet in her stomach, the giddy flip before impact.
She hated the fact that she was out here in the middle of nowhere, forced to rely on a stranger’s help. Cait didn’t know what the hell she was doing—that was becoming more obvious by the minute—but the worst thing was that Rebecca had no choice. In that moment, she felt like a star shining down from the night sky: cold and remote and utterly alone.
“Rebecca?” She could hear the fear in Cait’s voice as it rang out across the desert. She shouldn’t have stormed off like that. Rebecca took one last look at the screen on her phone—still no bars—and headed back.