Sybil sighed. “You’re right. You’re right.” She shook her head. “I think I’ve watched too manyDatelines.”
“Well, that is definitely true,” Zeke said, grinning. “Come on, how about Sudoku? I’ll let you win.”
“I win anyway.”
“Okay, but we can pretend that I’m letting you win.”
Sybil laughed and made her way to the living room. Zeke lumbered behind her. The only distraction from his pain was when he noticed when Sybil tucked the key into her front pocket, as if she had claimed it as her own.
32
Night Twelve
Sybil
December 10th
Sybil knew shehad seen a key before like the one she’d found in the couch last week. She just couldn’t remember where. It was infuriating, she thought on her way home from Zeke’s the next morning, that her brain was so muddled. She could take more Benadryl, numb herself to sleep, but that wouldn’t fix the root cause, and Sybil, unlicensed doctor, needed to uncover the root cause. Back in suburbia, she’d tried the key in all of Eloise’s jewelry boxes—why did her daughter have so many jewelry boxes?—then went into the garage and found Eloise’s old diaries, and it wasn’t the right fit for any of them. She could have just asked Betty if it were hers, and if so, of course just returned it no questions asked, but honestly, she didn’t want to. Here was another puzzle to solve. Here washerpuzzle to solve.
Tonight, she, Zeke and Julian had decided to decorate the Christmas tree in Zeke’s apartment. Sybil had grown up with parents who didn’t believe in religion though they were technically Jewish, so didn’t have a tree in her house regardless.When she married Mark, she made a big show of the holiday for the kids—wreaths on every door, a tree so tall they needed a ten-foot ladder for the star, Christmas music starting on December first, a menorah and latkes the first night of Hanukkah, which then tapered off by the fifth night because eight nights felt like a lot, even for a supermom. But this year, for obvious reasons, her heart wasn’t in it. After the Thanksgiving debacle, Charlie was going skiing with some fraternity brothers, and Eloise was coming home, albeit begrudgingly, and albeit at the very last minute just a few days before Christmas. Mark? Well, she’d hired Natalie’s lawyer, and they’d communicated only through her at an ungodly expensive hourly rate.
“I’ve never actually done this myself before,” Zeke said as he stepped back to assess their work. “I’ve always just hired someone, and I’ll leave for the day and return, and it’s done.” He cringed as he said it, and Sybil started to reassure him, but he said, “God, that sounds awful. Maybe I used to be awful. Holy shit, I think I actually was awful.”
It had been Sybil’s idea for the three of them to gather. Four, if you included Betty, but something grave washed over Betty’s face when Sybil proposed it, like decorating a tree was bringing up the grief of losing her parents, and besides, Betty said, she had to work. Sybil thought of the key, which she had placed on the kitchen counter earlier that evening, and she wondered what else Betty had locked away. She noticed that when she returned to the kitchen to mull some cider, the key—unsurprisingly or maybe surprisingly—was gone.
“Did you have a favorite ornament growing up?” Sybil asked Betty before her shift started. Sybil was attempting to untangle the tree lights that she’d found in a box that Zeke’s assistant had delivered from storage. She should just leave it alone with Betty, not scratch the itch that there was something, maybe alot of things, that Betty wasn’t telling her. Perhaps it was simply the residual pain of being an orphan. Whatever it was though, Sybil felt an urgent, compelling need to know. She frequently told Natalie not to be a town gossip, and yet once Natalie started sharing all the lurid dirt, Sybil would pour herself a coffee and pull up a chair. This really wasn’t any different. The knowing she shouldn’t and the doing it anyway.
Betty shook her head. “No, I was the youngest.”
“The youngest doesn’t get to have a favorite ornament?”
Betty shrugged before making an excuse that she had to get ready for work. “The youngest of five doesn’t really have much say at all.”
Zeke’s arm was beginning to heal, so Sybil put him to work, hanging the ornaments on the top half of the tree. He moaned a bit and complained—he was too tired, too sore, and wanted to plop on the couch, but Sybil knew he needed a nudge. Besides, they werealltired; you couldn’t just stop your life for that, give in to fatigue like it was gravity. And as much as she wanted him for herself, she worried that he was getting too complacent, too easily willing to abandon a Hall of Fame career because the road back was arduous. She’d mentioned it last night, and for the first time since they’d met on the Insomniacs forum, an undercurrent of disagreement ran between them.
“Sybil, I’m not one of your kids,” he had said. “I don’t need you to push me into a direction. I have plenty of other people who are already doing that.” She saw his eyelid spasm and wanted to tell him that she noticed these things, she saw him in ways that others didn’t.
“I’m not—that’s not what—” she stuttered. Because that was what she was doing. But also, he needed it. He just didn’t see that he needed it. But she did! “I just don’t want you to sit around with me and piss this recovery away.”
Her ears burned red as soon as she said it. He wasn’t justsitting around with her. Like she should flatter herself. Like he was giving up a career to hang out on his oversized couch with Sybil Bowman Foster. She knew he enjoyed her company, and she very well knew that she more than enjoyedhiscompany, but they hadn’t discussed that yet, if they were ever going to discuss it at all. Sybil felt like a middle schooler, trying to read his signals, trying to send her own signals back, uncertain if any of it was being decoded correctly.
“Sybil,” he sighed, then started to speak, then stopped. She wanted to retract it, to say of course he wasn’t just sitting around with her, but she was worried she would say something even dumber. Sybil almost never said spectacularly stupid things—in fact, it was her specialty, always knowing just what to say—and yet with Zeke, it happened all the same. If he mentioned it, she would blameherexhaustion. It was a perfectly reasonable excuse. Finally, he said, “Sybil, I know that you mean well, but the choices I’m making here…the decisions…I don’t mean to be rude, but they’re mine to make. Okay? It’s much more complicated than just doing the physical therapy, just grinding it out. I might do all of that and still not recover. I might do all of that and recover and never be as good as I once was. I might be as good as I once was and not want it anymore.”
“I know but—”
“Actually, you don’t know, okay? You don’t.”
“Zeke, I’m just trying to help.”
“But you’renot,” he snapped. “Youcan’t.”
He stood up and went to his room, closing the door. Sybil waited for him to emerge, but eventually, when he didn’t, she made her own way to the guest room, tried her usual stretches to soothe her weary back, and was still awake when she heard Betty come in from her shift. This morning, they had eachpretended that it never happened, Sybil organizing the tree trimming, Zeke stumbling out to physical therapy with Timothy yammering his ear off about endorsement deals.
Tonight the tree was nearly done, and it was spectacular. Gold and silver and swirling white lights. Just before Zeke did the honors to illuminate the room, Julian’s phone buzzed. He swiped at his home screen, and a scowl washed over his face.
“Excuse me,” he said, then disappeared around a corner.
“Should I—” Zeke asked, his hand on the remote control.
