“No,” Sybil said. “Oh goodness, definitely no. I just—you’re better with people than I am. If you needed to gain someone’s trust, I guess I’m curious how you would go about it.”
“One second,” Eloise said. The line went quiet, and then Eloise was back and said, “Charlie, I’ve patched you in with Mom. She needs our advice.”
“Hi, Mom,” Charlie said.
“Oh! Hi, honey, how are you?” Sybil hadn’t heard a peep from Charlie in over a week, and yet Eloise got him on the phone within seconds. She was beginning to suspect her closeness with her children was a one-way, situational relationship.
“Fine,” he said, and she heard him swallow down a burp. She stopped herself from asking if he were out drinking, because he was a college freshman and that wasn’t any of her business anymore.
“Well, as I was saying to Eloise,” Sybil said, “you are both…well, people like you more than they like me.” Sybil thought of Mark. People liked Mark more than they liked her too. For allof his failures, even despite his mediocrity, Mark was likable, winning even. Sybil was fastidious and organized and razor-sharp. But this also meant that she was highly strung, occasionally inflexible and usually convinced that she was right. (She was usually right, so there was that.) “And I’m in a predicament because I very much need to convince someone to trust me, to like me, even when he has no reason to give me the time of day or the benefit of the doubt.”
“Oh Jesus, Mom, is this about Zeke Rodriguez?” Charlie asked. “I am not prepared to weigh in on your dating life, even if it’s with Zeke Rodriguez.”
“No,” Sybil sighed. “It is not about Zeke Rodriguez.”
She still hadn’t heard from Zeke, and she couldn’t lament that for another minute. She was a forty-six-year-old woman going through a divorce who had some delusional fantasy about a hot younger man. When she left Zeke’s apartment that night, after Timothy had torn down their evidence wall and after Zeke started throwing his clothes onto his bed next to the suitcase with the jammed zipper, she was convinced that he would call her. Text her. She hadn’t thought it was afightfight. Not a split. She and Mark used to bicker all the time, but you woke up, forgave each other and took another step forward. Her argument with Zeke hadn’t been the sort of argument, so she’d thought, that shattered everything. First a day passed, then another one, then another, and after a few, she asked Natalie what to do, and Natalie told her that Zeke sounded like an emotionally immature dickwad. Sybil didn’t think that was quite fair, but then her phone remained dormant, so what did she know.
Maybe she shouldn’t have been so surprised. In Georgia, after Annabeth dropped them at the hotel, Zeke said a brusque good night by the elevator bank. She knew that his arm was hurting from when Annabeth swerved off the road, but she layflat in her bed, staring at the stucco ceiling, trying to figure out if she’d done something wrong. Said something wrong. The next morning, he was silent in the car to the airport, and though he signed a few autographs at the gate and took a few selfies, he wasn’t himself. Could barely meet her eyes. Then came Timothy’s pop-in, and the next thing Sybil knew, it was as if Zeke had been yanked from her life so quickly, the whole thing nearly felt like a mirage.
“Middle-aged women don’t have to put up with this shit, you know,” Natalie said.
Natalie was right. And Sybil was prepared to snap out of it.
“It’s about something else. Nothing romantic, okay?” she said to her children.
“Thank god,” Charlie said.
Eloise snapped, “Oh, shut up, Charlie. You don’t get to shame Mom for being awoman.”
Sybil wanted to crawl under her covers, because she was pretty certain her kids were now talking about her sex life.
No one said anything until Eloise spoke back up.
“I think the only way to go, Mom, is to just be totally honest. People respond to transparency, they don’t want to be pushed into something they aren’t comfortable with—”
“Right, so you didn’t want to be a doctor,” Sybil said. “I got it.”
“Well, yeah, but more than that, people like Charlie and me because we meet them where they are. Like, we’re friends with everyone—the math club and the football team and the robotics kids and the quiet ones and the weed kids. Everyone just wants to be seen, you know?”
“Even better,” Charlie said. “Everyone wants to be heard.”
Sybil was a little astonished that she had raised two children who were so much smarter than she was.
“Say whatever you need to,” Eloise said. “But be honest, no bullshit. Meet him where he is.”
Sybil had taken up enough of their time. Pluto hopped up onto the bed, sighed, plopped at her feet. She opened the flip phone, decided that she was just going to be honest. Explain who she was, how she knew Betty, how much she cared for her and how profoundly worried she was about his sister. How she found his postcards—she included pictures of them tacked up to her wall as proof in case this all sounded preposterous—and that she thought Betty was trying to find him, in Los Angeles or San Francisco, wherever he might be at his penultimate or very last stop on this voyage of his.
She fell asleep around threea.m.
When she woke up, there was a message from Levi.
59
Night Twenty-Five
Zeke
January 16th
