He stood, took his time and stretched. His arm didn’t reverberate with pain the way that it used to, and that should have made him happy or maybe that should have made him scared. When he stopped in the moment to consider it, though, it made him feel almost nothing at all.
“I don’t know if she needs us, Sybil. We want to think she does. But maybe Betty knows what she’s doing. Maybe she left for a reason. Maybe we don’t know what those reasons are because she didn’t want us to. Maybe we have to live with that.”
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“Why is it that your opinion simply overrules mine?” Hedidn’t mean to get so pissed, but actually, he was suddenly extremely pissed.
“My opinion doesn’t overrule yours,” she said. “But you’re implying that we just leave this alone. I can’t do that.”
“Why? Why can’t you do that? If Betty has been on her own for four years because she wants herfreedom, why would you be the one to stop that?” He was yelling now because this was as much about him as it was Betty. “I actually don’t even know what we’re doing here! Don’t you think, if she wanted our help, she would haveasked?”
“Zeke!” Sybil said louder again, but he was already down the hall, heading toward his bedroom. He couldn’t have explained why he was looking for a fight, but sensed that throwing a punch would be gratifying, might dissolve the hurricane of tension threatening to combust inside of him.
UPDATE ON CHURCH FIRE
The Macon Telegraph
June 19th, 2021
By Annabeth Collins
Questions remain outstanding about last week’s fire at the Revivalist compound. Authorities have yet to determine the cause or the site of where the fire broke out, as over half of the building burned completely to the ground. Three bodies have been recovered, but several are still reported missing, including Pastor Aaron Jones and his youngest daughter, Elizabeth. The deceased include Jones’s wife and two church elders who were among the founding members of the sect. Jones is presumed dead—as his personal effects have been recovered, as well as DNA matches—while Elizabeth, it is understood, had not been seen at the church that night and may have fled the scene. Investigators have listed her as a person of interest but concede she may, in fact, have perished in the fire, which is cited as the deadliest fire in Georgia in the past decade.
More details are emerging about both the pastor and the church, where Jones was thought of as something of a divine prophet from God. “We believed that Pastor Jones was our judge, jury and potentially executioner,” one former member who wished to remain anonymous said. Those who have left the church are shunned by the remaining members and often harassed and threatened by what former members called the Task Force. There was also the death of another council member, the church treasurer, two years ago. Initially ruled a carbon monoxide poisoning, it is now being looked at in a new light. “Jones set it up such that there could be no dissension,and if there was, you were punished or ridiculed until you didn’t have the desire to dissent anymore,” said the anonymous source.
A different former member describes being shunned from the community for forty days and nights because he was caught going to a local bar and was seen dancing with a nonmember. “It turned me around real good,” he said. “Until they picked out a bride for me, and I realized I didn’t want to be married to a child, and I wanted to live my life, including going dancing at bars.” This same source noted that he has not spoken to his other family members, who remain steadfast in their commitment to the church.
“Jones says that he is a disciple of God,” a third member, still active in the church but who agreed to speak with no identifying details, also shared. “My parents brought me into the church when I was eight. I don’t know any different. If he says that he sees God and hears God, well, you should come by one Sabbath and hear for yourself if we are blessed enough to have him return. I have prayed every day since the fire that he comes back to us. In physical form, in spiritual form, in godly form. It doesn’t matter to me. I just don’t know what I would do without Pastor Jones’s guidance. I think all of us here at Revivalist feel the same.”
Inspectors remain on the scene, and this is a developing story.
43
Night Seventeen
Sybil
December 28th
Christmas had comeand gone, a depressing span of days that Sybil spent mostly by herself with her unadorned tree in her living room, while Eloise went back and forth between the pied-à-terre with Mark and the house in the suburbs. After Sybil and Zeke had their disagreement the night before Christmas Eve, she returned to her empty house rather than bridge their gap. She suspected she could convince him that theyhadto find Betty in order to help her, but then he made the last-minute decision to fly to Oklahoma for the holiday—he emerged from his room and said his physical therapist was on vacation so he was going to take one too.
She wanted to text him multiple times a day:
Did you hear back from the reporter?
Did the charger for the old flip phone arrive?
Do you miss me?
She flattened herself on the couch, not nearly as enveloping as Zeke’s, listening to Pluto’s snoring, and reached for her phone. This was ridiculous! They were adults! She didn’t getinto squabbles unless it was with her teenage daughter or her philandering husband! She hadn’t gone this long without speaking to Zeke since they’d met in September, and she was pretty sure, with the holiday over and wrapped, he was back from Oklahoma by now. Shortly before they’d argued, she’d overheard him talking to his agent about what came next in January, amping up his training to see where he could be by February, then into March and spring training. Timothy was on speaker phone while Zeke paced in his kitchen, the tenor of Timothy’s voice all business, the tenor of Zeke’s the same. Sybil had been under the misguided notion that maybe Zeke’s heart was no longer in it, in his rehab, in the game, but maybe she’d misread him. Or maybe he’d let her misread him so that she thought they were more aligned, not just in what the future looked like, but in his focus on Betty, on helping her, on finding her.
Her phone buzzed in her palm, and she shot up, ramrod straight, startling Pluto. She’d barely been working out lately, but all those years of Pilates evidently paid dividends. Maybe Natalie was right. Maybe at forty-six, she still had it. Maybe if she just took off her clothes for Zeke, her new doubts about what was going on with them would fall to the wayside.
No. This was foolishness, this was fantasy.
She swiped at her screen, her pulse palpable in her neck, as if maybe Zeke had been thinking of her at that exact moment too.
Simone:hi sybil, sorry to bother. know it’s late
