“What about the blood?” she asked, meeting his eyes. “It will stain your floor.”
“Oh god, Sybil, fuck the floor,” he said, and he was delighted, if one could be delighted in such circumstances, to see a hint of her smile.
They managed to get her down to the garage where the car was waiting. Betty floored the gas as they turned the corner from his building, and the tires spun out.
“Holy fucking shit!” Zeke yelled. “Betty, can we get there in one piece?” He grabbed the handle above the back window with his good arm, feeling slightly emasculated that he couldn’t be the hero. He glanced at Sybil, but she had her eyes closed, her head tilted back against the headrest.
Betty drove like she’d grown up as a professional Formula One driver. If Zeke hadn’t been so terrified, he would have been impressed. She dodged taxis and late-night dog walkers in the Central Park Transverse, and she pulled an absolutely insane move where she went around a city bus on the wrong side of the street. Zeke was certain he foresaw his own death. By whatever miracle, Betty bounced right up to the curb by the ER, and Zeke—having texted his agent, Timothy, that he needed someone waiting for them at the Sinai ER with a wheelchair, only to get into a tedious back-and-forth with Timothy that he was not the one who needed it and no, he couldn’t get into the details now, and no, there was not going to be a lawsuit—waved down the nurse. Sybil was wheeled away, and Zeke looked for a nearby bush by the curb because he thought he might throw up.
“Are you okay?” Betty asked.
“Where’d you learn to drive like that? And no, I’m about a minute away from vomiting.”
She pursed her lips together into a flat line, as if debating what to tell him.
“I drove the tractor a lot on my family’s farm.”
Zeke couldn’t help himself. His staccato laugh erupted so loudly that Betty jumped away from him.
“What?” she said.
“Betty, I know that I’m not Sybil, and I know that I’m not even Julian, but seriously, I’m not that dumb. If you’re going to lie to us, you’re going to have to learn to do it a little bit better.”
15
Night Five
Betty
Technically, Betty didnot have her driver’s license. Not technically. Actually. She wasn’t allowed to drive back home, and once she left, she was wary about giving identifying details in a government database. Which she knew sounded paranoid. Bananas, really. But Levi used to tell her all sorts of things about the way the government put its finger on you without you even being aware of it—sounding exactly the same as their father, ironically—and even though she hadn’t spoken to Levi in months, she couldn’t just shed his voice in her brain. So what she didn’t tell Zeke is that she’d learned to drive that way because she worked at a pizza place that doubled as an arcade as her first job outside Baltimore. She always took the latest shift, and after she closed for the evening, she playedPole Positionuntil the early hours. Armed with the key to the machine, she just unlocked it and reused the same quarter over and over again. Like a lot of things in life, Betty was self-taught.
At the hospital, in between trying not to gape at the knife jutting from Sybil’s foot and not draw attention to herself, shereplayed the scene from Grand Central. Not just meeting Caleb, the thought of whom fluttered her stomach, but if someone had snapped her picture. If someone was on her tail. She worried that maybe her mind was playing a trick on her, that she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen, because if she had, then she needed to execute plan B and fast. But if she hadn’t—maybe it was just someone holding their phone up trying to get better reception—well, she didn’t want to spin this into a problem. Her brain was doing this more often with its lack of sleep: Sometimes, she felt like she was unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. Like she was in a prolonged fugue state that had become her life.
“Where is Dr.Foster?” Sybil demanded at the nurse’s station.
Betty was seeing Sybil in a whole new light tonight. She’d written her off as an overbearing maternal type, but now she was thinking that Sybil was someone who shot to kill and didn’t miss. Betty’s own mom had been overbearing but not particularly maternal, a much less desirable equation. Occasionally, Betty thought she saw her mom’s face in the crowd, on a subway platform, on a clogged New York City sidewalk, and even though thatwasjust her mind playing a trick on her, she always panicked, always fled by pointing herself in the opposite direction.
“I believe that Dr.Foster is resting in the lounge,” a nurse said.
“Well, someone rouse my husband from his beauty sleep,” Sybil snapped. “I’m about to lose half my fucking foot, and god knows that man owes me a few things.”
Betty and Zeke exchanged a glance. Betty was pretty sure that Zeke’s cheeks were flushed in that horny way she’d unwillingly grown to recognize in men. The first time she saw it, she was thirteen, and it was from an elder in her father’scongregation. Her dad was making introductions, like a barely pubescent girl had any interest in conversing with a man who had flecks of gray in his sideburns, like Betty had the emotional sophistication to fully entertain what the implication could or would be. Patience, then nineteen and already married and pregnant, had swooped in, taken her hand and ushered her into the refectory before Betty had truly processed what was happening. It was one of the few times Betty could remember that Patience, since marrying Matthew, had taken an interest in looking out for her.
The nurse hesitated for only a flicker of a moment, then ran down the hall.
No less than twenty seconds later, a boyishly cute middle-aged man emerged. His hair was sticking up in the back as if he’d been sleeping hard, which, Betty figured, of course he had been. She disliked him on the spot. The offense of deep sleep in the middle of his work shift was enough, but also, Betty had developed a radar for duplicitous men since that time at thirteen, and the casualness with which he approached his wife, the round handsomeness of his face, the demeanor of bravado, all signaled the same thing: This was not a man to be trusted. She felt a firework of anxiety, could still feel the clutch of Patience’s hand, and reminded herself that she was safe here, that sometimes she was just too tired to sort the red flags from the white ones. Besides, this man was Sybil’s problem to deal with, not hers.
She inhaled deeply, blew out her breath and clenched her fingers into fists so no one saw them shaking.
“Jesus, Sybil!” Her husband dropped to the floor to examine the situation. “What the hell?”
“Get me to a room,” Sybil said. “I’m worried I’m going to lose the toe if we don’t deal with this immediately.”
Mark jumped to his feet and only then took notice of Betty, his eyes lingering on her for a beat too long.Skeevy.Then his jaw loosened when he recognized Zeke.
“Are you—” he started, then stopped, then looked at his wife. “I’m sorry, I don’t— Did you come in here with Zeke Rodriguez?”
“Mark!” Sybil barked. “Focus! Do you want me to bleed out in the waiting room or are you actually going to do your job? Or do I have to do everything around here?”
