Chapter 15
Night Five
Betty
Technically, Betty did not have her driver’s license.
Not technically. Actually. She wasn’t allowed to drive back home, and once she left, she was wary about giving identifying details in a government database.
Which she knew sounded paranoid. Bananas, really.
But Levi used to tell her all sorts of things about the way the government put its finger on you without you even being aware of it—sounding exactly the same as their father, ironically—and even though she hadn’t spoken to Levi in months, she couldn’t just shed his voice in her brain.
So what she didn’t tell Zeke is that she’d learned to drive that way because she worked at a pizza place that doubled as an arcade as her first job outside Baltimore.
She always took the latest shift, and after she closed for the evening, she played Pole Position until the early hours.
Armed with the key to the machine, she just unlocked it and reused the same quarter over and over again.
Like a lot of things in life, Betty was self-taught.
At the hospital, in between trying not to gape at the knife jutting from Sybil’s foot and not draw attention to herself, she replayed the scene from Grand Central.
Not just meeting Caleb, the thought of whom fluttered her stomach, but if someone had snapped her picture.
If someone was on her tail. She worried that maybe her mind was playing a trick on her, that she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen, because if she had, then she needed to execute plan B and fast. But if she hadn’t—maybe it was just someone holding their phone up trying to get better reception—well, she didn’t want to spin this into a problem.
Her brain was doing this more often with its lack of sleep: Sometimes, she felt like she was unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary.
Like she was in a prolonged fugue state that had become her life.
“Where is Dr. Foster?” Sybil demanded at the nurse’s station.
Betty was seeing Sybil in a whole new light tonight.
She’d written her off as an overbearing maternal type, but now she was thinking that Sybil was someone who shot to kill and didn’t miss.
Betty’s own mom had been overbearing but not particularly maternal, a much less desirable equation.
Occasionally, Betty thought she saw her mom’s face in the crowd, on a subway platform, on a clogged New York City sidewalk, and even though that was just her mind playing a trick on her, she always panicked, always fled by pointing herself in the opposite direction.
“I believe that Dr. Foster is resting in the lounge,” a nurse said.
“Well, someone rouse my husband from his beauty sleep,” Sybil snapped. “I’m about to lose half my fucking foot, and god knows that man owes me a few things.”
Betty and Zeke exchanged a glance. Betty was pretty sure that Zeke’s cheeks were flushed in that horny way she’d unwillingly grown to recognize in men.
The first time she saw it, she was thirteen, and it was from an elder in her father’s congregation.
Her dad was making introductions, like a barely pubescent girl had any interest in conversing with a man who had flecks of gray in his sideburns, like Betty had the emotional sophistication to fully entertain what the implication could or would be.
Patience, then nineteen and already married and pregnant, had swooped in, taken her hand and ushered her into the refectory before Betty had truly processed what was happening.
It was one of the few times Betty could remember that Patience, since marrying Matthew, had taken an interest in looking out for her.
The nurse hesitated for only a flicker of a moment, then ran down the hall.
No less than twenty seconds later, a boyishly cute middle-aged man emerged.
His hair was sticking up in the back as if he’d been sleeping hard, which, Betty figured, of course he had been.
She disliked him on the spot. The offense of deep sleep in the middle of his work shift was enough, but also, Betty had developed a radar for duplicitous men since that time at thirteen, and the casualness with which he approached his wife, the round handsomeness of his face, the demeanor of bravado, all signaled the same thing: This was not a man to be trusted.
She felt a firework of anxiety, could still feel the clutch of Patience’s hand, and reminded herself that she was safe here, that sometimes she was just too tired to sort the red flags from the white ones.
Besides, this man was Sybil’s problem to deal with, not hers.
She inhaled deeply, blew out her breath and clenched her fingers into fists so no one saw them shaking.
“Jesus, Sybil!” Her husband dropped to the floor to examine the situation. “What the hell?”
“Get me to a room,” Sybil said. “I’m worried I’m going to lose the toe if we don’t deal with this immediately.”
Mark jumped to his feet and only then took notice of Betty, his eyes lingering on her for a beat too long. Skeevy. Then his jaw loosened when he recognized Zeke.
“Are you—” he started, then stopped, then looked at his wife. “I’m sorry, I don’t— Did you come in here with Zeke Rodriguez?”
“Mark!” Sybil barked. “Focus! Do you want me to bleed out in the waiting room or are you actually going to do your job? Or do I have to do everything around here?”
Another doctor approached. Betty thought she looked like she could be Sybil’s younger sister. A little blonder, a little thinner, fewer lines around the eyes.
“Mark, is everything okay?” She reached her fingers toward his arm, then took notice of Sybil, not just Sybil’s foot, and yanked her hand back as if Mark were a live wire threatening electrocution.
“Oh my god, of course,” Sybil said, her voice a full octave lower now. “The anesthesiologist.”
“I’m sorry?” the woman, whose fair skin was now beet red, said.
“Your perfume,” Sybil hissed. “I might have a knife in my foot, but my nose works just fine.”
“Sybil, I think you’re going into shock,” Mark said.
“If it’s shock that I came to this ER for you to treat me and instead, I’m meeting your lover,” Sybil said, “then you are correct.”
Now the nurses were all paying attention.
Betty saw one move her hand to cover her mouth, and the other two looked like they were either going to live-tweet this or possibly pee in their pants.
She glanced to the corner and noticed the security cameras clocking this as well.
Just a precautionary measure for the hospital, but there was no denying that Betty was well exposed now.
This was why she had always been an island.
This was how she got into trouble, by softening and actually caring about people.
She’d learned to drive that way because Levi had taught her that she needed to have every available resource at her disposal to stay safe.
In case you ever need to get away quickly, he’d said, better to be prepared.
So Pole Position wasn’t exactly traditional driver’s ed. It was emergency driver’s ed.
“Syb,” Mark said, then Zeke took a step forward, and Mark shut up.
“Can you please treat her like you would any other patient?” he said, his voice booming, and Betty was certain that Mark’s testicles curled up nearly inside of him.
This was absolutely incredible. She wanted to take notes.
She wanted to film it. She wanted a mother who stood up to her husband like this.
She wanted to be a woman who had the courage to do the same.
She wanted to be a normal teenager who didn’t practice driving at a dingy arcade/pizza place and instead had parents who paid for a driving instructor or gave her the freedom to drive herself in the first place.
“Not like any other patient,” Sybil said. “He’s really not a very good doctor. I let him cheat off of me through medical school and had to hold his hand through our residency.” She started to say more but seemed to think the better of it.
“I don’t think—” the anesthesiologist started.
“I don’t care what you think,” Sybil said. “But if someone doesn’t get this knife out of my foot in less than two minutes, I will not be held responsible for my actions.”
“Do I need to call security? Mark, should I call security?” the anesthesiologist stuttered.
Betty watched Mark grow increasingly rattled, his eyes darting from his wife to his mistress.
It was almost enough to distract her entirely from Grand Central—had that really just been an hour ago?
She tucked her hand into her pocket and felt Caleb’s card.
That part she hadn’t been imagining. She let herself drift for a moment to another world, another time, when she was just a normal girl who collided with a normal boy, and they would go on a normal date and have normal drinks then normal sex then maybe some normal months or years together.
Betty had never had a real boyfriend for a variety of reasons.
Zeke inched closer to Mark. “Do not call security, dude.”
“I can’t believe…are you two friends?” Mark really had a problem focusing. No wonder Sybil didn’t seem to like him very much.
Zeke placed a hand on Sybil’s shoulder, and she tilted her head toward it. It was a master class move, Betty thought. Enough of a hint to worry Mark; enough of a threat to maybe make him panic.
“We are,” Zeke said, though he may as well have said that they were fucking, given the look in his eye.
Betty wondered if something wasn’t brewing between the two of them, which she would endorse because she genuinely liked them both—and also, maybe it might divert Sybil into less mothering.
Betty did enjoy her doting, but she suspected that Levi would disapprove of her having any parental figures in her life.
She made a mental note to track him down.
They’d gotten good at checking in every few months, but—she tried to rewind the calendar—it felt like it had been longer than that by now.
“How do you know each—” Mark started, but Sybil cut him off with a guttural howl.
“My big fucking toe is dangling from my fucking foot, Mark! If you want a goddamn autograph, he’ll do it afterward!”
The blood drained from Sybil’s husband’s face.
How easily she emasculated him in front of the staff; how sharply she cut him down to size.
Betty absolutely loved it. She tried to memorize everything about it.
She tried to picture her saying these sorts of things to her father, to Noah, to Jacob, to Patience once she made herself over in her husband’s image.
Fuck all of you. Fuck the patriarchy! She never did, never would.
But she enjoyed thinking about it all the same.
“Right, right,” a nurse said as she rushed over. “Dr. Foster, I’m taking her into room 305. If you aren’t up for treating her, please let me know immediately so I can page the on-call resident.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the anesthesiologist said. “Of course we can treat her.”
“If you even think of working me up,” Sybil said to her, her voice so calm that Betty thought she might be an actual sociopath, “I will take this knife out of my foot myself, and then all bets are off.”
The anesthesiologist stiffened. “Is that a threat? Are you threatening me?”
“No,” Sybil said as the nurse began to wheel her away. “The threat is that when I walk out of here, Mark is all yours. You wanted him? You got him. Good luck.”