CHAPTER 32
‘There’s a town, Terlingua. It’s far enough away to have different police, in case any are in business with the kidnapper, but near enough to get to.
There were day trips there from camp all the time.
People came back with all sorts,’ Lucy tells her, once they’re back in the car.
‘We ought to head for there. I think it’s pretty big.
We’ll be able to hide in plain sight. I’m pretty sure there are motels there that would take us without ID.
’ She pauses. ‘We need to get rid of our phones,’ she says.
‘Yes. They’re tied to us.’
‘They know we’re in this car.’
‘I know,’ Simone says. She has been thinking about this, wondering what to do, but now she has a plan.
Some survivalist tendency from her adolescence is rearing up within her, bringing with it memories.
She got ahead of the dot-com boom by leaning into technology, something she’s never once regretted – every job uses it, even cooking: the precision of vacuum-sealing vegetables, then cooking them in a water bath – and now she knows what their vulnerabilities will be: the phones and the hire car.
Lucy’s come to the same conclusion by virtue only of being young and raised on a diet of smartphones and YouTube.
‘I think we get as far as we can get, then ditch it,’ Simone tells her. ‘We can’t now, in the desert.’
‘No. OK.’ Lucy fiddles with the glovebox.
And neither of them is talking timescales. Maybe they can’t, maybe they don’t know, or maybe they simply can’t bear to. Simone’s never done denial, but perhaps she is, tonight. And what eighteen-year-old would be able to unpick feelings and decisions this complex?
‘It wasn’t much of a holiday,’ Lucy tells her in the quiet car, and the sentiment is so darkly funny that Simone can’t help but let out a little bark of laughter.
‘No.’
‘I have had better.’ A pause, then she adds, ‘God – I’m sorry. It’s easier to joke than to cry.’ And Simone’s heart flips over in sadness.
‘We will have better,’ Simone says, and she’s shocked to find it feels like a platitude.
The things they may be missing out on seem to play out in front of them.
Holidays, Lucy going to RADA, going home?
Simone cannot bear to look at them, can’t yet face reality.
She can’t be thinking that none of this will happen, that their lives as they knew them are over.
It’s too painful, too raw and too shocking.
They will get home. They will. And if they don’t, she wants to look when it isn’t a gaping, bleeding wound but instead a scar.
Maybe she can spare herself from the pain that way; she did so with her parents.
She never cried about them. Not when social services made the order and she went to live with the foster family.
Not when she had her first stilted and supervised contact with her parents in the Costa with automatic doors that blew the rain inside every few minutes.
Weekly meetings soon became monthly, and the reason became clear: her parents perceived it was her fault.
She had embarrassed them, a relative once said, by being taken into care; it was so dramatic.
They stopped speaking eventually. They lost touch.
Then, years later, her father got ill, and it was Damien who opened the wound for her, sitting on a little rope swing at a National Trust property two hours after her father’s funeral.
‘If you were an addict and you had to apologize to Lucy, what would you say?’ he asked plainly. They’d walked and walked afterwards, ended up there without plans.
Simone closed her eyes. ‘I can’t …’
‘Just one sentence.’
She looked at him, then, at his open face. They should have been back at the restaurant, she’d said. It had been back in the time when it was a resounding failure and they were needed at all times to keep it afloat. But, there in the little clearing, it felt like it had never existed.
Simone expected to speak a cliché, to say she was sorry, but she didn’t.
‘I’d say it’s never the child’s fault,’ she said in a small voice, and that had been all it had taken.
Damien had joined her on the rope swing and they’d twirled and glided there in the dappled sunlight, Simone crying on and off, Damien saying nothing with his words and everything with his arms around her.
‘We’ll go on another trip,’ Simone repeats now. ‘None of this is your fault, Luce.’
‘And Mum – it isn’t yours,’ Lucy says simply, and Simone leaves it there.
‘I need to …’ Simone says, and she eases herself out of the car, gesturing again to her phone. ‘Dad.’
Lucy nods, her eyes wet and scared.
Damien doesn’t answer what Simone can’t bear to think might be the last contact between them for a while, and Simone isn’t surprised; he can’t.
Only, this time, she leaves a voicemail. ‘I …’ she says, wondering if this will incriminate him, or her, or everyone, but not able to leave without some words. She can’t say she will try to contact him – his phone will be being watched. She can’t think about how impossible it all is.
But they will go home again. Of course they will.
They’re just – figuring it out, for now.
Buying time on credit, on overdrafts, on high-interest loans.
So she says the only thing she feels she can: ‘I … God, Damien. I love you. I can’t wait for us all to be together again. I wish none of this had ever happened.’
There’s nothing else left to say. She can’t give a clue to her whereabouts, and neither can she implicate him. All she can do is speak from the heart. ‘I’m wishing we could be with you,’ she says. ‘Always.’
This is a see you later. That’s all.
It has to be.
She presses End Call even though it feels unsatisfying, incomplete. But she needed Damien to know she loves him.
She stares up again at the American sky and she thinks about her plan, as flimsy as those stars made of gas and heat.
The first step is to buy a phone that isn’t connected to them, so that they can keep an eye on the news.
The second step is the scrapyard. They’ve got to get a different car.