For the first time since high school, he’d gotten semi–out of shape during the off-season, and now the team andhisteam were determined to rehabilitate him in time for spring training. No matter that the doctors were no closer to promising him that he’d make the comeback. But surgically, there wasn’t much else to do. Either he got it back or he didn’t. Modern medicine wasn’t going to be the answer. No matter that sleep was literal recovery time, when his body was meant to stitch its seamsback together, and without it, he simply couldn’t heal in the ways his team anticipated.
Sybil was straightening up the living room, though there really wasn’t much to straighten. But Zeke knew her well enough now to know that she needed to keep her hands busy, needed to keep her mind busy actually. She moved on to the couch cushions holding a Dustbuster that Zeke was pretty sure she’d brought from her own house. She lifted one pillow, zoomed under it, lifted another. When she got to the last one, she stopped, hunched over and picked up something small and silver.
“Is this yours?”
“What is it? I can’t see it from here.” Zeke could have scooched closer, but honestly, his whole body was screaming. He envisioned his fibrous muscles wrestling with his tendons, all of them squabbling while being flooded with lactic acid. Why had he chosen this as a profession again?Because it was the only thing you were ever good at, his brain replied.
Sybil walked around the coffee table and stood in front of him. She was holding a small silver key.
“No, that’s not mine,” Zeke said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“It looks like one of those diary keys that Eloise had in middle school.”
“Yeah, I don’t keep a diary,” Zeke answered. “So definitely not mine.”
“Maybe from a locket?” Sybil sat next to him, and the pillows shifted to accommodate her. She was wearing just a lilt of perfume tonight. Enough so that his olfactory nerves caught the scent and nearly made him feral wanting more. Wanting to inhale it, wanting to inject it straight into his veins.
“I don’t have a locket either,” he laughed. “Wait, maybe it’s Lani’s? Let me text her.”
Lani had stayed for a few days after Thanksgiving to makesure that he was steady on his feet. It meant that he had gone the whole weekend pretending that he slept through the night and wasn’t as emotionally wrecked as she had suspected. It also meant that he went the whole weekend without seeing Sybil. When she showed up tonight shortly after Betty left for her shift, he relaxed, uncoiled, as if she infused him with joy in the same way that his nutritionist infused him with a vitamin IV. Sybil was a type of vitamin IV.
He snapped a picture and texted it to his little sister.
She wrote him back within a minute.Not mine.
Then:You get your head on straight?
They’d had an argument before she left—Betty was out so she couldn’t overhear, and they used their full voices—about how privileged he was, to be born with a rocket of an arm, to make boatloads of money, to take all of it for granted. He’d snapped at her that he didn’t take it for granted, not a single second. What he wanted to say was that it was the opposite:He resented that this all came so easily to him.That he hadn’t ever considered another option. But now, with the air diffused from their fight, maybe she was right. Maybe he didn’t have it in him anymore to fight for his career. Not just his career. His legacy. Maybe all he needed was to sit on this couch next to Sybil. Forever.
“It must be Betty’s,” Sybil was saying. She stood and turned to wait for him.
“I don’t think I can get up.”
She offered him a hand, and he held out his good one, linked their fingers, and she hoisted him to his feet. He groaned like a wounded bear, but she just said, “Come on, we’re snooping in her room.” He liked that about her too: She was soft when she needed to be but also knew that Zeke couldn’t be coddled. Not if he was going to make a comeback. And probably not if he wasn’t going to either.
Betty’s room was neat as a pin. The bed was made with nary a wrinkle, all the throw pillows aligned symmetrically. Zeke noticed she’d bought a candle that was still in the box on the bureau, but there were no other personal touches, nothing to differentiate the room from how it had been two months prior, before she moved in. Not a picture frame of her family; not a discarded scarf or glove on the accent chair in the corner.
“Wow,” Sybil said. “I’d kill for Eloise or Charlie to be this neat.”
Now that Zeke thought about it, Betty never left a thing out of place. Her water glass was handwashed and placed back in the cabinet, her coffee mug the same.
“It’s as if she doesn’t want to be a disturbance,” he said. Sybil clicked her tongue in either agreement or disagreement, she didn’t say.
Sybil opened the top bureau drawer.
“Oh, I don’t think we should—” Zeke said, but she waved a hand, cutting him off.
“I’m just poking around.”
“And you think we need to find her diary? Or her locket? For…?” His voice tilted up in the form of a question.
Sybil closed the top drawer, opened the middle. Closed the middle, then opened the bottom. She spun around, glanced at all the corners of the room.
“Sybil, you can’t read her diary, you know,” Zeke said.
“I know,” she said. “She just won’t answer any of my questions. I just want toknowher. So I can help her.”
“Maybe she has her reasons,” Zeke said. “And maybe she thinks she’s telling you enough.”
