Night Nineteen
Sybil
January 2nd
Annabeth drove herToyota Camry like it was a Porsche 911. The engine rattled as they flew down the highway, and from the back seat, Sybil clocked Annabeth taking sly glances at Zeke beside her like she couldn’t believe this wasn’t part of a practical joke. She’d insisted on picking them up at the airport and was now giving them a Georgia geography lesson, though from what Sybil could tell, they were mostly driving through rural acreage. Every once in a while, an exit sign popped up with gas or fast food, but other than that, it was mostly vast grasslands or leafless towering trees that were waiting for spring to wake them.
“So you actuallyknowElizabeth, erm, Betty?” Annabeth said. “Because I want to be thoughtful about how you bring this up.”
Annabeth had stayed in touch—in a professional way, nothing church-related—with Patience. She’d called her, and Patience had agreed, hesitantly, to speak with her again. Annabeth hadn’t mentioned Sybil and Zeke.
“I don’t want to spook her,” Annabeth explained. “It took me a long time to get her to see me as someone she could trust.” Her GPS announced there were police ahead, and she slowed to something in the ballpark of the speed limit.
“We did know Betty. Wedoknow her,” Sybil said. She was sitting in the middle of the back seat like a child in carpool and leaned forward between the two of them. “She lived with Zeke actually.”
“As roommates,” Zeke said. “I was just…I don’t know, helping her out.” Sybil watched him flex and relax his fingers over and over again. She knew this meant his arm was stiff, and she knew that Timothy and his trainer were displeased that he’d taken time off to chase this wild lead down south.
“A lot of people around here thought the fire at the church meant that it would be the end of it,” Annabeth said. “Or maybe that’s what a lot of them hoped. They were losing family members to it, being, I don’t know, one mother said ‘put under the pastor’s spell,’ even though that might sound crazy. But I guess they were happy to see it burn.”
“I’m not religious,” Sybil said. “I’m not sure I get it.” She thought of her parents, thankful for their Jewish atheism, her hackles rising at the mere suggestion of being under anyone’s thumb.
“The Revivalist Church isn’t one of those things where you just show up on an occasional Sunday, sorry, Saturday for them, or go to Christmas mass,” she said. “Everything about your life becomes about serving the church; whatever salary you earn—and around here, that can mean not a whole hell of a lot—goes back toward church offerings. You can’t really socialize outside of the group; you’re expected to spend just about all of your free time at services orinservice. And the women—”
A car shot by on the other side of the two-lane highway, itsbrights on, cutting through the blackness. Annabeth flinched and swerved to the side of the road, an overcorrection. Both Sybil and Zeke were propelled to the right. Sybil just swayed in the air, but Zeke’s elbow careened into the armrest, and he yelped.
“Sorry, shit, sorry,” Annabeth said.
“You okay?” Sybil said to Zeke.
He nodded, but she saw him blink quickly, trying to stave off the appearance of pain in unwillingly teary eyes. He grimaced, reached over with his left hand and massaged his arm.
“The women—” Sybil prodded Annabeth. The journalist was young, maybe late twenties. She had jet-black dyed hair that was blunt cut to her chin, a double nose ring, and unusually pale, near translucent, skin. She presented as both ambitious and disarmingly unprepared, a dangerous mix that, at least in Sybil’s former profession, could end in disaster. Sybil could hear Eloise in her ear, telling her not to be so judgmental, telling her maybe this was half of Sybil’s problem, as if Sybil had allthatmany problems. And Natalie’s divorce lawyer was at least handling her primary one.
“Right, the women, they’re basically, like, think of a draconian society where women are just there to serve men. That’s the Revivalist way.”
“What does that mean?” Zeke said, his voice tight, his face a wince. He was still massaging his arm, and Sybil wished she were within reach to do it for him.
“Married young, there only to serve their ‘heads’—that’s head of household—pop out baby after baby, definitely no birth control, their entire purpose is keeping house, no higher education, that sort of thing.”
Annabeth flipped on her blinker, and they slowed, turning down an unpaved road that the GPS missed, marked only witha series of mailboxes. She’d been here often enough to spot it in the dark.
A sprawling ranch home rose to meet them at the end of the drive, a woman standing on the front porch illuminated by torch lights. She raised a hand as they approached. When Sybil got out of the car, she could see that Patience was at least five months pregnant.
“I hope you don’t mind me meeting you outside,” she said. “The kids are asleep. Matthew is in a meeting with the other elders.”
That she was Betty’s sister was immediately obvious. Patience was taller, and her hair was a rich brown, but the geography of their faces was borne of the same map. The straight slope of their noses, the perfect symmetry of their cheekbones, the shape of a heart formed with their chins. Patience, like Betty, had violet half-moons under her eyes, and Sybil wondered if she, too, never slept. Patience tugged her chunky knit sweater around her, as if the air were particularly chilly, which it was not.
Annabeth made quick introductions, and if Patience recognized Zeke, she didn’t betray it.
“And I’m sorry to sound ignorant,” Patience said. “But why are you here? Are you interested in becoming members?”
Zeke looked at Sybil, and Sybil looked at Annabeth.
Sybil made the decision for them. In order to get any answers, they had to be honest. She’d learned this in medical school: Don’t pretend that you don’t see the facts at hand, even if they’re not what you want to see. Avoiding the unavoidable only delayed care. Patience struck her as a woman who had dealt with her own set of truths; you don’t birth a litter of children and not at least become a little keen tosomeaspect of the world’s reality.
“You have a beautiful home,” Sybil said, because it was true.She didn’t know what she was expecting for a pastor and his wife, but it wasn’t this, a new build, something that reminded Sybil of a Montana ski lodge that she might have flipped past in one of her magazines when they were redoing the house and she had nothing better to think about.
“Thank you,” she said. “My husband and our church built it from the ground up.”
