Mark:hey, sorry this took so long, Jasper’s been in Switzerland
Sybil:naturally
Mark:still nursing that grudge?
Sybil:no grudge, he just refused to call me Drall through our residency
Mark:that’s a grudge, syb
Sybil:he’s a misogynist, so then yes
Mark:no wonder Eloise turned to women’s studies, she got it from her mom
Sybil muttered, “Fuck off,” but smiled because he was right. Eloise wasn’t going to pursue medicine, but maybe Sybil had imbued her with the exact right amount of self-sufficiency.Enough to tell her meddling mother that she needed to chart a course of her own, but not so much that she didn’t see the bigger picture. Sybil didn’t know how you could be a women’s studies major and not consider the bigger picture. Now that she thought about it, and yes, it could have been the glass of wine warm in her belly, she was utterly delighted at Eloise’s decision.
Sybil:i’ll text her, tell her that I expect her to be a supreme court justice
Mark:sybil
Sybil:i’m joking
Mark:i have to head to the hospital—on call—but here’s the list.
An attachment landed in the text box.
Mark:It wasn’t Wheaties, sorry, my bad. It was Fodor’s. Remember how we were fanatical about that guide for our honeymoon? Anyway, I’d forgotten, Jasper told me, how Fodor’s had a contest with National Geographic where if you took pictures in front of each landmark and sent them in, they were doing a giveaway of free guides for life. So not postcardseither. My bad. Memory is going in our old age, I guess.
Sybil wasn’t surprised that he’d gotten it wrong. But she was a little surprised that he admitted it.
Sybil:so you entered?
Mark:no, we totaled the car, remember?
Of course they had. She’d forgotten some of Mark’s stories, as if once he vacated her life, she was able to open up a little more space for new information.
She clicked on the attachment, sent it to her printer.
Mark had been right about some of it though. She held the list up against the wall of postcards. She and Zeke had sorted them by postmark, but now that she had an actual road map, she could see that this was more than just a nomadic brother who sent a postcard every four months or so from a new state. This was a brother who was telling her where she could find him. Or at least that’s how Sybil would have done it. Send a coded message, let her know he would stay for a while, let her know that he was one beacon shining in the darkness if she needed it.
But why go to such lengths? Sybil knew about their draconian father. She knew about the fire and Patience and Matthew. Were Betty and Levi running because they had started it? No, Levi was long gone by then. To confirm, she stripped the postcards from the wall, flipped each of them over. They dated back six years ago, starting in Washington, DC, the National Mall. Sybil traced through the next few and landed on Niagara Falls,early June of 2021. She already knew the date of the fire but retrieved Annabeth’s article fromThe Macon Telegraphanyway. Overlooking details could be the difference between life and death on the operating table. Or on aDatelineepisode. How many cases had gone cold because investigators were three degrees too sloppy? Sybil had never been three degrees too sloppy, unless she considered her feelings for Zeke, which weren’t so much sloppy as they were reckless. How foolish she was, how stupid she felt.
The fire destroyed the church and killed four people on June 11th. The postmark from Niagara Falls was June 8th. Ostensibly, Sybil realized, Levi could have made it home to Georgia. Sybil fought the urge to text Zeke and tell him that maybe they got everything wrong. That they hadn’t considered that Levi and Betty could be running because they conspired to burn it down together.
54
Night Twenty-Two
Zeke
Arizona was miserable.Zeke hated that he was being trotted out to the press as some sort of comeback king. He hated that the team had put him up in a cookie-cutter condo with the rest of the training staff in same building, that every single thing he did day in and day out revolved around his recovery, and if he wasn’t doing something involved with his recovery, he had multiple sets of eyes on him to course correct so that hewasdoing something that revolved around his recovery. Timothy had set up camp for the time being at the Four Seasons and made daily check-ins, and when Zeke snapped that he didn’t need a babysitter, Timothy said that Zeke’s attitude was maybe half of the problem. So they added in an extra day with the sports psychologist, who was also housed at the condo complex, which meant that every time Zeke left the apartment, he risked colliding with someone who was on the team’s payroll.
When his bloodwork came back with sky-high cortisol, he finally told the sports medicine doctor that he never slept, anda prescription was written on the spot. Zeke didn’t think that a sleeping pill had cured the rot that caused the problem—and he resented that no one stopped to askwhyhis cortisol, the stress hormone, had blown through the roof. But at least for the past four nights, it meant that he wasn’t staring at the ceiling and thinking of how he fucked things over completely with Sybil. And how Betty might be, at best, in trouble, at worst, in danger. He would wash the white pill down with a custom-blended electrolyte drink each night and wake up five hours later, disoriented that he had actually managed to sleep. The first thing he would do, in the darkness of his bedroom before the sun rose, was check to see if Sybil had texted, emailed, called. He would have taken a stupid Sudoku at this point. He considered that he could be the one to bridge the divide, but he’d been brusque, overly harsh the night of their fight. He knew she’d want an explanation, and he also knew he’d feel like a fool when he couldn’t offer one. Sybil was not the type of woman to shrug her shoulders and accept half-formed apologies. He thought about that night in the hospital, with a knife literally impaled in her toe. How she still managed to keep her head on straight when Mark and his girlfriend appeared.
No, Zeke was now coming apart at the seams, and he didn’t want to drag Sybil into his open wounds. Georgia. That would have been the time to do something. To let her know how he felt. To kiss her. Maybe if he’d kissed her in Georgia, he wouldn’t be down here in Arizona without her.
He stepped out of the condo. It was still dark outside, and Zeke hadn’t adjusted to the snap of the cold desert in the morning. His arm was sore from yesterday, and the air, even with his team fleece, seized his elbow like a vise. He exhaled, and a plume of condensation from his breath dissipated. The clock on his phone said 4:37a.m. He realized that he had about twohours to steal away before anyone on his team would rise. They reported to breakfast at 7:15a.m., were at the weight room by eight. Then it was swimming and cardio and massage and more weights, then some throwing time, then repeat repeat repeat. Zeke was a cog in the wheel. An extremely well-paid cog in the wheel but still a cog.
He took a right out of the condo’s driveway. The streets were empty, but he stayed on the sidewalks, a luxury of this particular spot of Arizonian suburbia. He thought again about that trip to Georgia, but this time, about Betty. He’d started listening to a book about how people get sucked into cults. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d read a book that didn’t have to do with anatomy or kinesiology or nutrition. Timothy had spotted it on his phone on the plane, and said, “Jesus Christ, Zeke, you’re not in a fucking cult. It’s called the major leagues.”
