She ignored him. “Do you think,” she started, then trailed off. “Well, do you think that all of this is helping? That we’ll ever actually sleep again?”
Julian thought he might literally die before he slept through the night again, but he knew what she wanted to hear. And so, with so many lies already between them, he said, “Yes, Betty. Absolutely yes.”
Then before he could assess if she believed him, there was a commotion, followed by loud shouting in the living room, and they both darted up and ran inside.
27
Night Ten
Zeke
In Zeke’s defense,if he had full use of both of his limbs and had been better rested, he would have punched that motherfucker back. He would have dodged his fist in the first place and then flattened him onto the fancy hardwood floors that Sybil had told him, a few nights ago over chamomile tea while they were both in their pajamas, she had taken two weeks to select and now had grown to resent.
“Two weeks,” she had said flatly. “Do you know how bored I must have been to obsess over such things?”
“And you were top of your class at Harvard Medical School,” Zeke had said. He liked that they now had this inside joke, something only the two of them shared.
“That’s going to go on my grave. My highest achievement.”
“You’re a very good mom,” Zeke had said.
“That’s true,” Sybil had acknowledged, and blew on her mug. “But they’re gone. And Charlie never calls, and Eloise seems to hate me even when she does call. I worry…I worry I may have pressured her into becoming me.”
Zeke had grown too fond of her to tell her what his first coach always told him: That no one takes anything from you that you don’t give them. That you don’t lose a game unless you’re the one who makes a mistake, and even if you’re flawless, they might still get the better of you. Years later, he didn’t think his coach was quite right, but also, he didn’t think he was entirely wrong. Instead, Zeke reached over as she sipped her tea and squeezed her knee. When her smile met her eyes, he let his hand linger. She did that thing again: reached around, rubbed her shoulder that he knew ached, and he was close, so so close to inching nearer and offering to work the knot out, but then she stood to pour more water from the kettle. But he liked his hand there, on her knee, maybe up her back, too, as if it was something solid to hold on to when everything else around him felt so tenuous.
Tonight, Mark, the taker of what was hers, had literally just punched him in the jaw. Simone had gasped, “Not Zeke Rodriguez’s face!” like that was the important part. She and Zeke had been discussing women’s college sports when Zeke felt a blow and stumbled back into the stainless steel refrigerator, which, thankfully, broke his fall. Because if he had fallen on his throwing arm, already so damaged, he would have strangled Mark with his left hand alone.
“Jesus Christ, Mark!” Sybil yelled. “What is wrong with you?”
Mark was staring at his fist like he couldn’t believe what he’d done, like his fist had a mind of its own, completely separate from his brain. From what Sybil had told Zeke about him, maybe this was true. Or maybe this was Mark’s excuse about the whole mess he’d created in general.
“Dad! Oh my god,” Eloise said.
“Holy shit,” Charlie muttered, and started to leave the kitchen but then reconsidered, as if maybe he didn’t want tomiss his father taking another swing at the pitcher whose baseball cards he used to collect.
“Okay, okay, let’s all calm down,” Zeke’s dad said. Zeke hadn’t even introduced them yet to Julian or Betty, who had been outside. They’d barely been there for five minutes when Mark had walloped him. “I’m Daniel, Zeke’s father.”
“Dad—” Zeke started. He didn’t need his father to treat this like a scuffle on the middle school playground, even though in many ways, that’s exactly what it was.
A timer went off, and Sybil, who Zeke only now noticed was the hue of an extremely ripe eggplant, said, “Oh fucking shit, that’s the turkey!”
Eloise said, “Oh my god, Mom. Dramatic?”
So Sybil snapped, “You’re an adult now, Eloise. You can handle me saying ‘fuck.’ I say it all the time.Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
And Charlie started laughing so hard that Mark, who had started all of this chaos, said, “Charlie, maybe you should excuse yourself until you have calmed down.”
“I don’t thinkhe’sthe one who needs to calm down,” Lani interjected. God, Zeke loved his little sister.
“I don’t know what got ahold of me,” Mark said.
“That’s not an apology,” Sybil said. “That is not even in the ballpark of an apology.” She was now trying to wrestle an enormous turkey out of the oven, and Zeke moved to help her out of instinct until he realized that with only one arm, he was impotent. The turkey was perilously close to teetering toward the floor when Simone stepped in. Julian had mentioned that he thought he’d been a pretty absent father, but from what Zeke could tell, he’d done a better job than he gave himself credit for.
“Well, this is an extremely exciting first Thanksgiving for me!” Betty said. Zeke hadn’t even noticed her there, but Bettyhad a way of slipping into rooms and into conversations unnoticed.
“Wait,” Eloise said. “You’ve never had Thanksgiving? Are you, like, not from here?”
“It’s a long story,” Betty said, and Zeke wondered how long a story it could actually be. Then he wondered why he didn’t know this about her, how she’d been living in his apartment for over a month now, and actually, he still knew so very little about her.
