Simone arrives next to the church, body and mind boiled in adrenaline so rich her nerves feel steeped in it, like they will never be the same.
It’s a large, dusty area off a wide, sweeping highway, craggy mountains in the background, their peaks the colour and texture of old bones. Dead vegetation rots on either side of the road. The church stands just a few yards back, a white, blocky building with two boarded-up windows, and she can make out an ancient-looking padlock on the door.
The sun has fully set now, a pale strip of sky to the west hints at where it once was, but there’s nothing else. Only her, the desert, the sky, and God, she supposes.
On the top of the church rests a simple white cross on the roof that Simone knows to be a Latincrux immissa, the type with the long vertical bar. Her parents, before the alcohol got them, then the occasional cocaine, then the heroin, had lived in a converted rectory. One of Simone’s worst memories, aged fourteen, is finding a small, clear bag of cocaine hidden in the confession box that sat by their front door.
Simone has only drunk once in her entire adult life as a result. It was recently actually, after Lucy’s leavers’ ball while waiting for her and her friends to arrive. Simone had sampled some of the red wine that paired with the wood pigeon she’d cooked. She’d sat out there at the back of Dishes with Damien, her fellow teetotaller, and they’d raised a glass. It had been the first time alcohol hadn’t felt dangerous to her. Damien poured it, sloshing in the colour of liquid redcurrants, and it had felt – pleasantly – like nothing. Just a toast to their adult flying the nest. An understanding of the pairing notes on her tongue. And a moment with her business partner, but more importantly her husband.
‘Maybe your twenty years of functional family has healed me,’ she’d said genuinely to him. It had taken Simone atleast a decade to learn to speak her feelings without being self-conscious, and she was healed even more by Damien’s response: a soft clink of his glass to hers and a strong arm around her shoulders. Otherwise, unconditionally accepted silence.
They’d been interrupted then by some drama, Luan at front of house had double-booked – embarrassing and unusual – and they’d gone back to being business partners once more, Damien methodically going through the booking system, Simone rearranging that night’s seating plan.
But, later that evening, as all of Lucy’s friends arrived for the dinner, they’d felt closer, somehow. Husband and wife. Those shared drinks that didn’t unlock a monstrous part of her personality, that didn’t lead to Saturday cocaine in bathrooms, that didn’t result in addiction. Just a nice moment with nice Damien, that’s all.
She turns her eyes away from that white cross, switches the engine off and gazes around her. It’s a place to commit a crime, that’s for sure. No houses, church long abandoned. Not even any street lights. She hasn’t seen another car in over half an hour. No CCTV.
She takes five steadying breaths, then turns her iPhone off in case it rings. She can’t think when Damien will land, but it must be soon, and she needs focus and calm.
She’s twenty-two minutes early, and she opens the flip phone, waiting. She stops thinking at quarter to nine, not caring at ten to. She is an Olympic runner on the starting blocks, an astronaut about to launch, a labouring woman, and, by nine, there is only her intent, the Texan darkness, and Lucy, somewhere out there, relying solely on her.
At one minute past the flip phone beeps, and she opens it mechanically.
Welcome, it says, and Simone’s teeth begin to chatter.Nowdispose of this phone. There is a dumpster 500 yards down the street, at the intersection between fourth and fifth. Destroy it first. I’ll be watching.
Simone’s hands are shaking as she reads and rereads it. She exhales a hot puff of air and opens the door with a crack. It’s the wrong side of the car, driven on the wrong side of the road. Everything is upside down. Her legs feel shaky and insubstantial, dreamlike legs.
Outside, it’s deserted, air as black as soot. Simone is too afraid to use the torch on her phone, so instead stumbles her way up the lay-by. The desert has retained the heat of the day, and clouds of unseen soft insects flit around her as she moves through the darkness.
The highway is as straight as if measured by a ruler. Simone can’t help but stare at it, the unfamiliar yellow road markings, the vastness of Texas’s skies and landscapes.
The bin is easy to find, a municipal container at the edge of the lay-by, cigarette butts in a metal container on the top, a letter-box-sized opening underneath.
Simone shivers in the warm air as she holds the phone up for someone invisible and unseen to witness, then puts it on the floor and stamps on it several times, until the casing breaks and the display saysINSERT SIM.
She drops it into the bin. Half a second, then a loud thud at the bottom.
Her back prickles, thinking that this person, this person who has her daughter, is watching her right now, making sure she complies. And if she doesn’t, he could take her, too.
She can do nothing except obey completely.
Several moments pass, then she hears ringing. Confused, she looks at the bin, but it’s in darkness. The only other thing here is a silent payphone, SOS emblazoned across the top.Save our souls. Simone wishes she could use it.
She follows a white light beaming up intermittentlysomewhere else, and discovers a second new phone in the undergrowth off the lay-by, nestled between two rocks.
She answers it.
‘Put your hands in the air. Walk twenty paces back and forward until I text and tell you to stop,’ an automated voice says, and then disconnects.
One, two, three paces this way, she reaches twenty, then turns back, thinking that soon she is going to get her daughter back, and all this fear will have been worth it.
The ground is dusty, kicking up monochrome clouds in the dimness. Fine powder coats her legs, the skin on her hands. It smells arid, settles on her tongue, the chalky taste of those early days when she and Damien decorated the restaurant together. Damien put on a playlist while they sanded and painted. Simone remembers telling him that he had awful taste in music but was good at edging. He told her she was the opposite. In the end, she selected the best indie music and he finished the room.
Twenty paces.
Thirty.
After two laps, the phone beeps. This time it’s a text.
