“Elizabeth, get up,” she said to her sister, not her son.
“What?”
“Stand up, John needs to learn his lesson.”
“His lesson for what?” Betty did stand but glanced toward John. “Johnny, what did you do?”
Patience rested her hand on her arm. “It doesn’t matter. Matthew says that explaining yourself when you’ve done wrong doesn’t absolve you of what you did.”
“Patience,” Betty said, “he’s three.” Her sister looked exhausted, but Betty noticed she was now allowed to wear a hint of mascara and her nails were painted a very soft pink. Progress, perhaps, in softening her father. Or maybe Patience was rebelling. Betty liked that option better.
“I like your nails,” she said. “I didn’t realize we could—”
Patience looked down at her own hands as if they weren’t her own.
“You should go,” Patience said quietly. “You need to clean up before the Sabbath.”
Betty was in dark blue jeans and an itchy knotted deep forest green sweater, too hot for the June weather, that she’d taken from Levi’s room, which was still untouched from when he left. Her father had lifted the onerous dress code only a few months earlier, and though she had a few new items in her closet, she often had to improvise to look even remotely normal at school. She still had to cover all of her skin, but at least it wasn’t those heavy woolly dresses that suffocated every pore.
Before she could insist on helping, her father appeared, and Patience’s spine shot even straighter. John bit his lip, his little nostrils expanding and compressing with each breath, but otherwise frozen in his concentrated effort not to disturb his grandfather. Her dad took a singular look at Betty, her androgynous clothing, her hair wild and matted after a day at school, and clicked his tongue.
“Disappointing,” he said, and Betty’s breathing quickened. A laundry list of things she wished she could say in return, a laundry list of ways she wanted to cut him down to size sprung to mind. She, of course, said nothing. Saying something meant at best a diatribe, at worst, the back of his hand. “I expect you to be my very best one, Elizabeth,” he added.
“I told her,” Patience replied. “I told her to go home.” Thenshe turned her back toward Betty and proceeded into the refectory with her daughter still on her hip, a vase of flowers in one hand, and her son, terrified, still sitting on the cool linoleum floor.
Later, when she replayed this memory at the library in Omaha and even again afterward, she wasn’t certain of much of it. She was pretty sure that Patience had recoiled when reminded of Johnny’s age; she was pretty sure that her father had reprimanded her appearance even though he was the one who had modified the rules; she was pretty certain Patience had soft pink nail polish on. But trust, even in herself, was slippery, a minnow in a porous net. Maybe none of that had happened. Maybe her trauma and her sleeplessness had turned her brain inside out, embedding memories that were actually fiction.
At the library, Google landed on Julian’s obituary. She didn’t know what she expected, like she or Sybil or Zeke would be mentioned, but it was short and concise. She thought he would like that: the brevity. Clean lines, no fluff. Most important, it was confirmation that she hadn’t panicked, that reality wasn’t blurring into something vaguer. Julian had been struck by a car near his apartment.
The walk to the hostel took forty-five minutes. She tried Levi again along the way. She’d swapped out the sim card of her phone as soon as she left New York, so she didn’t expect him to pick up any more than she expected him to answer when she tried him at Thanksgiving. He’d been crystal clear: use the flip phone; anything else he blocked or would assume was too risky to answer. But in her haste to leave, she’d left the flip phone, their only meaningful lifeline for six years, at Zeke’s.
She kept trying; he kept not answering.
She reached the hostel, home for the next few nights while she regrouped, showered, tried to rest, whatever that meantthese days. She stood beneath the glow of the vacancy sign for a long beat, turned around once more to be triple-certain no one had followed her. Then she stared up at the vast, star-filled sky.
He was out there somewhere underneath the same expanse of galaxies. She was getting closer.
53
Night Twenty-Two
Sybil
January 12th
Sybil hadn’t reallyexpected Mark to follow through with the list of landmarks, so she spent the next few nights falling down rabbit holes online in an attempt to track down the sites that matched the postcards, but she was frustratingly coming up short. Nothing about Wheaties at all. So when that proved fruitless, she couldn’t stop herself from googling Zeke and reading an article inTheArizona Republicabout his move to Phoenix in preparation for spring training. Timothy was quoted, as was the manager of the Mets, all prophesying optimism, a roaring return, a sure thing in the lineup by opening day, but notably, Zeke was absent in any line, any word of the article. There was a picture of him in the training room at the Mets’ facility taken by the paper’s photographer, so Zeke had signed off on the piece, but when Sybil zoomed in on his face—and she zoomed and zoomed and stared and stared—he looked stony, the Zeke she had witnessed the night of their fight. Not the Zeke she’d known all the nights before that.
She lingered on the photo longer than she should have. Hehadn’t reached out in a week, and Sybil knew that was more about him than it was about her, but still, it stung. She had thought they were friends. For a while there, maybe even more than friends. In Georgia, yes, his assistant had booked separate hotel rooms, but when they checked in, he had lingered at the front desk, the question forming, an unusual uncertainty between them. She got so flustered that she blurted out, “Reservation for Rodriguez, two rooms,” and she saw, out of the corner of her eye because she absolutely could not look anywhere but straight ahead, Zeke deflate ever so slightly.
Or maybe she wanted to see if he would deflate ever so slightly. It was dawning on her that she was going to be single for the back half of her life, and the thought of meeting someone new, of casual sex, was less thrilling, more daunting than she’d considered when she’d announced to the kids at Thanksgiving that Mark was fucking Vivian.
She stood. Poured herself a glass of white wine from a bottle that Natalie had dropped off when she told her about Mark’s drop-in. Natalie hadn’t had to ask if Sybil was reconsidering the divorce because that wasn’t what this was about. She took only one look at her and said, “Bastards, who needs them.”
It had started to snow outside, and Sybil could tell by the way her excess frenetic energy was radiating through her that it was going to be an entirely sleepless night. She’d adjusted, as much as a human could, to a few hours here and there, to drifting off at onea.m.and waking at foura.m. Tonight, she already knew even that was out of the question.
She opened the patio door, grabbed two logs from the stack that Mark had brought home from the hardware store earlier in the fall at the first hint of chillier weather. She started a fire with ease, one stroke of a match on the kindling and newspaper. Her mother had taught her self-sufficiency, and she nearlylaughed out loud at how her self-sufficiency had hardened, then morphed into something akin to loneliness. She considered that maybe this was why she was so dogged in finding Betty, in helping her. Maybe Betty’s own self-sufficiency had also hardened; maybe Betty was lonely now too.
She folded herself in front of the fire with Pluto stretched in his dog bed, snoring, then drained her wineglass. Just as she rose to pour a refill, her phone pinged with a text.
