“Yes, exactly,” she answered, because they could speak each other’s language now, nearly finish each other’s thoughts. Zeke felt something joyful bubble up in him again, not lust, but…was it contentedness? What he had been missing, he realized, as Sybil nudged her half-eaten plate of donuts toward him, allthrough his career, was a sense of connection. Being the best in the league was fantastic until it was no longer particularly interesting to him. You challenge yourself until you run out of challenges, and then, evidently, you freeze in front of a line drive that both you and your agent well know you could have dodged, and you use it as an excuse to quit. Because you don’t have the emotional tools to say:Hey, I could stand a little help here, a little support, a little friendship, a little love. I want to do something else with my life, but self-destruction is the only visible path out of it.
“So Betty…” he said, putting the pieces together.
“And Levi,” she answered.
“Their dad is maybe not so dead after all?”
“I think she came all this way to stop running away from him, to end his pull on them. Levi said”—she stopped, sighed—“Levi said that their dad would never let Betty go if he had a choice in the matter. So maybe Betty is going to leave him with no choice in the matter.”
“And Levi is going to stop her?” Zeke asked.
Sybil drummed her fingers over the faux-wood table. “Stop her, help her, I’m not clear. He is somewhere between a savior and a lunatic, and I’m not sure that I have figured it out.”
“Well, I’ll help you figure it out,” he said. He reached under the table, linked his fingers into hers again and squeezed. When she squeezed back, he felt like it was the first time on the mound the night of his major league debut. All nerves and electricity.
“Your arm?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, good as new. Sore after training but in a good way.”
“Modern medicine,” she said.
He stood. “Come on, time’s up.” To the donut lady, who had a box waiting for him, he said, “This new megachurch? Can you give us directions?”
When they were nearly there, Sybil turned to him.
“The fire, I forgot. You didn’t tell me who started it. And how you figured it out.”
“Levi didn’t tell you?” Zeke asked. They were on a wide-open two-lane highway. Yellowed grass, barren trees, an occasional cow zipped by.
“I didn’t ask,” she said. “To be honest, I’d forgotten that the fire mattered. I only wanted to find Betty.”
“The fire has to matter,” he said. “Because that’s what set this whole thing in motion.”
Zeke’s GPS announced that they’d be making a turn in a thousand feet, then their destination was half a mile down the road. He veered right around the bend, and that’s when they saw it. Zeke was so stunned that he nearly careened the car onto the shoulder of the road into the aluminum guardrail.
“Zeke!” Sybil. “Oh my god.”
He slammed on the brakes to get his wits about him and turned to face her, but she was as pale, as stunned as he must have been.
“Go!” she shouted. “Don’t stop, we need to go!”
“Is it…is that a building?” he asked. “Is that…”
“Just go!” she said again. “Go.”
He startled out of his stupor and rammed his foot on the accelerator, so hard that Sybil’s head jolted back against her headrest.
There in the distance, a plume of smoke snaked into the air, rising up like a pox, like a curse that would trail Aaron Jones no matter where he ran.
66
Night Zero—The Fire
Betty
Four Years Ago
Betty was pissedoff at Patience for sending her home to change for the Sabbath. She liked how she looked, in Levi’s green sweater, in the jeans her mom had bought. When her dad relaxed the dress code, her mother, in a rare moment of independence, had told Betty to get into the minivan and taken her to the local mall. They’d eaten at the food court and bought two pairs of jeans, a pink sweater and a striped button-down at the Gap, and when they pulled back into their driveway, her mother met her eyes and said, “Don’t tell your father, okay? But it’s your senior year, and I wanted you to have a few new things. To look pretty. Nottoopretty. But pretty.”
