Night Zero—Four Years Ago
Patience
June 11, 2021
Patience hated settingup for Sabbath, but her father had determined that it was her duty, even though she was twenty-four and should have aged out of parent-mandated chores years ago. She hated being pregnant again when the other three kids were still so little; she hated that Matthew thought her father could literally walk on water, and if for some reason he couldn’t, if he slipped under the water and drowned, that Matthew would happily accept his fate as lead pastor.
Betty was turning eighteen next week, and their father had selected Silas to be Betty’s husband. Patience snapped off flower stems and put them in vases. Patience hated Silas. Never mind that he had a drinking problem, never mind that he liked to gamble. Silas was stupid and more often than not, unkind, and liked to comment on Patience’s breast size when she was pregnant or nursing, which was basically all the time.
In high school, Patience had been part of the chemistry club. She never told her parents and begged her teacher not to put her name in the yearbook. But she was good at science, andshe liked the rational way that experiments unfolded. The exact opposite of what her dad preached, of faith. She found that she could live with both, as if the contradictions between the two made each more interesting. Her sophomore year, they were tasked with exploding balloons. Nothing harmful, nothing too large. “I don’t want to lose my job, get on an FBI watch list,” her teacher had joked.
Most of the ingredients for explosives were found right in the kitchen. Patience was also an exceptional baker, which pleased her mother and seemed to validate her father, as if he’d been right by telling women that their place was in the home, subservient to men. When it was her turn to blow up her balloon in the science lab, her explosion was so loud and so fierce that the fire department showed up, and the school was evacuated thinking there had been a bomb.
Which gave her two ideas.
She asked her dad if she could start holding bake sales around town and at church, with the donations going to the tithe. She donated half and stuck the rest in aflourtin in the back of the pantry. Her mom had delegated nearly all the baking to her by then, and she knew the money was safe. When she had enough, she’d run.
The bake sales were the first idea.
The explosion, the fire, was the second.
When she turned eighteen, however, her dad surprised her with a wedding the night of her birthday. She knew Matthew from around the church, and though he was charismatic and handsome, he was also ten years older and a fanatical opportunist. Within a month, Patience felt nauseated, and then she peed on a stick, and she was pregnant.
Sixteen months later, she was pregnant again. She thought of the money in the flour tin, she thought of her growingresentment toward Matthew and her father, who had now roped her into monitoring the behaviors of other women in the church—including Betty, a task she reviled but did all the same, and one day, in a fit of rage, she dumped her personal Bible in the tin and slammed the top shut. On the Sabbath, when Matthew asked her why she hadn’t brought her Bible, she lied and said she donated it to a homeless woman at the shelter. Her dad teared up. She wanted to scream.
Three kids later, the flour tin and the plan had all but been forgotten. And then her dad asked her what she thought of Silas. For Betty. Levi was already gone, and she knew that he’d prepped Betty for the moment an opportunity to escape presented itself. Patience couldn’t abandon her kids, not now, not with Matthew, not with her dad. Maybe one day it would beherchance to get out, but for now, she could keep pretending because pretending meant she could at least do this much for Betty.
The night of the Sabbath, when she was snapping off flower stems, Betty showed up underdressed and unprepared for what her father was planning with Silas. Once they were married, it would be exponentially harder to leave. Patience well knew this. Patience had lived this.
She barked at her little sister, chiding her for her appearance, sending her home to change. She knew she had one shot, one chance to do this. So she tucked the flowers into a dry vase and placed a balloon filled with her chemistry formulation between the stems. Matthew had only recently allowed for nail polish, and nail polish remover, Patience knew, was flammable enough to burn the place down. She carried the balloon out of the kitchen and into the maintenance room, set it down right by the boiler, which was faulty, emitting steam and shooting off sparks every so often. Earlier that week she’d heard Matthew tell her dad they needed to call a repair guy. Her dad had toldhim that he’d try to fix it himself first, his way of saving money, which was absurd because Patience knew her dad was squirreling away fistfuls of cash with shady accounting and likely a lot of illegality on his taxes, not to mention the suspicious carbon monoxide poisoning of the treasurer a few years back. She dumped nail polish remover all over the floor.
She feigned a terrible case of morning sickness, and since the kids were her responsibility, too, planned to bring the three of them home with her as soon as she walked out the boiler room door. She hadn’t meant, honestly, to blow up half the building and start a fire that would reduce the entire place to ash, but she hadn’t been devastated when it happened either. She mourned her mother, who had never stood up to her husband, only briefly. She grieved her dad not at all.
She gave Betty a chance to run, and Levi had trained her well. She did.
A few weeks later, Levi called. She might have been the scientist, but he was always the disbeliever. So, of course, he would be the one who discovered that their dad wasn’t dead after all. They agreed that as long as he left them alone, left Betty alone, then they could live with this tenuous tightrope. It worked for four years. And then her dad, a narcissist who could never ease his grip on his youngest, a girl, who dared defy him, decided that she needed to come back to him.
Levi called again yesterday, last night. She walked out of her home in the woods and got on a red-eye flight. They had a plan.
“I want him to know it was me,” she said to Betty, just like she’d vowed in her Bible years back.
You can never tame a woman into submission, she would say to him if he made it out alive, though she suspected that he had not. This was what happened when you tried.
Epilogue
March
Zeke’s press conferenceannouncing his retirement made the front page of every newspaper, which was saying a lot, considering the world was going to shit, and there were more important things to cover. Betty was relieved that these headlines were significantly more positive than the ones about her father. Like a cockroach of doomsday evangelicalism, he had made it out alive, though barely. She made good on her promise and called Richard Watkins, who sent a squad to the Reno hospital and cuffed him to his bed. The fire department had been racing down the road while Levi and Patience drove in the other direction, and Betty, Sybil and Zeke passed the fire engines in the opposite lane, holding their breaths, as if breathing meant the authorities could trace any of this back to them. No one did. The fire was ruled inconclusive, and since her dad was the only one on-site, an insurance investigator was sent out, and Betty stopped paying attention to those details since Richard Watkins made it clear there were other charges, the ones that mattered, pending. And then Watkins followed through.
Her dad pled not guilty for the deaths of three parishioners in Georgia court and was denied bail; everyone believed he was guilty—he ran, he abandoned his family, a second fire occurred on his watch. It was an impenetrable case. Sybil and Betty flew down to Georgia to witness the arraignment. Betty didn’t think she’d have the stomach to step inside the courtroom, but with Sybil beside her, with a hand guiding her, she walked in with her shoulders back, head high. Her dad wobbled to his feet and declared his innocence, and Betty knew she could speak up to clear him, but he was guilty of so much else that she thought this was poetic justice. He’d confessed to hiring someone to spook Julian but insisted he’d never agreed to murder. Unfortunately for him, the hired gun had disappeared like the smoke from the fires: gone, poof, no one to verify that her dad was telling the truth. “I just wanted that FBI goon to back off my daughter,” he said. “I had plans for her. To reunite. I was just getting them in order. I needed him to lay off. To let me bring her back into my flock.”
Betty didn’t know if she believed him, but that was beside the point. Richard didn’t, Richard hadn’t, and even if her dad weren’t prosecuted in Georgia for the fire that Patience had set, he’d likely spend the rest of his years in jail for the hired hit. The sentencing for the church fire was just an added bonus. Annabeth Collins, the reporter, was in the courtroom too. She wanted Betty’s story, she told Sybil, to tell the full truth of the church, to expose it for what it was. Betty wasn’t yet ready to crumble the house of cards while Patience was still embroiled in it, but maybe in time she would. She could. Only when that would be of service to her sister who had been of service to her for so long, in ways Betty was only beginning to grasp. And not before and until it was safe to deliver Patience’s own message to their father: that it had been her this whole time. One day. Soon.
Once the judge denied her father bail, she found herself on her feet, and her dad, as if he still believed he was her keeper, turned and met her eyes. Patience couldn’t be there, for obvious reasons—Matthew had sided with their father, and whatever came next would take time—so Betty would have to do this on her own. Not on her own, she remembered suddenly, as Sybil rose to her feet beside her.
“I was never yours,” she said, and she could hear her voice trembling. Her dad cocked his head. So she reached into her guts and said it with her full chest. “I wasneveryours. Not then, not now, notever.” Her dad heard her this time, she could tell by the way his lips formed a thin line, how his chest rose and fell as if he were trying not to combust. She reached for Sybil’s hand and spun around, bolting from the courtroom. If he had something to say in return, she didn’t want to hear it. No, she didn’tneedto hear it. They pushed open the doors to the courthouse, and the cool Georgia sun hit their cheeks, and for the first time in a long time, Betty thought she might believe in something like a higher power, even if that was just a belief in herself.
This morning, before Zeke’s press conference, they’d trekked north to the diner. It was an unseasonably warm day in New York, and Sybil proposed they walk, the trees showing off their new buds, the fever that infects Manhattan on bright spring mornings palpable. They ordered the pancakes, which Sybil laughed about because Julian never ordered pancakes, but none of them wanted the dried-out fruit plate he used to get, and they raised their coffee cups to him. Betty sometimes dreamed about him now, how a stranger changed the course of her life by protecting her because her own parents couldn’t, and she said this aloud at the booth by the window where the Insomniacs first gathered. Sybil got teary, and Zeke massaged her shoulder,and Betty thought that it was amazing, how strangers could become family, even when you didn’t ask for it. Sybil liked to talk more and more about their plan Bs, how you had to accept it when plan A went to shit, so after they toasted to Julian, Betty also toasted to plan B. What a marvel it was: to take the alternate route and have it lead you to a place you didn’t even know you were looking for.
