Chapter 30
Night Eleven
Betty
Betty still hadn’t heard back from Levi despite leaving him another message after Thanksgiving.
She’d tried emailing him, but it had gotten bounced back.
In the past, whenever he had dumped an email address, he’d always let her know the new one.
That he still had the same phone number was a miracle.
The old phone they used to communicate was dead on her end; she’d lost the charger in the move to Zeke’s, hadn’t had time to track one down at some outdated electronics store somewhere in the outer boroughs since she didn’t trust ordering from the internet.
So she had to keep hoping hoping hoping that he would answer her calls from her cell.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, so she wiped her hands on a dish towel after bussing a table and grabbed it.
Every time it vibrated these days, her cortisol skyrocketed.
She had to find a way to calm down. She had to find a way to calm down even if she didn’t hear back from Levi.
She just didn’t know how to do that. Maybe this was what your body just did when it hadn’t gotten the rest it demanded; maybe it just stopped differentiating between the red flags and the white ones.
Levi had been the first of them to get out, and when she fled two years later, when she was given that very small window of time to run in the backdrop of the chaos of the fire, she’d always felt protected because he’d been able to do it too.
Now? Everything felt unsteady. Everything was a bright blood-red flag.
The text was from Natalie. False alarm for panic.
A link to the cut of her laundry detergent commercial.
Betty pressed play and watched a different version of herself bike down a Manhattan street and get splashed with fake mud.
She wondered if anyone who knew her before would recognize her now.
Maybe not. Maybe she could pull this off unscathed.
Looks amazing!! Natalie had said.
Then: Next Wednesday at 3:30pm. Tampon commercial audition. She’d included the address. Pay will be 25k+.
Betty’s heart nearly stopped right there by the diner’s dishwasher.
She knew that she couldn’t keep risking exposure, but twenty-five grand meant that she could disappear forever.
To a nice little island in the Caribbean where she could subsist off mango and coconut and work at a fish shack.
It was beside the point that she didn’t know how to swim, or that she had never boarded a plane before.
Permanent freedom was so close she could feel it at her fingertips.
She was well aware that she was growing increasingly attached to Zeke, to Sybil, to Julian and even to Caleb.
She thought that would just be sex, inexperienced as she was, but it turned out that she actually really liked him.
But the really-liking-him part was the problem.
Really liking all of them was the problem, the problem that Levi had always warned her about.
If you’re going to do this, he’d written over email a few days after she’d thrown a few necessities into her backpack, grabbed the secret stash of money from their pantry and raced through the woods on her bike to the next town over, everything but staying undetected needs to be disposable.
For the past two months, she admittedly had grown used to her setup with Zeke.
She liked his apartment for obvious reasons—its thermostat set at a very pleasant seventy-two, the way the fridge was always restocked seemingly by a genie, the cotton percale sheets that felt like she was at a five-star resort.
If she’d ever been to a five-star resort, which she had not.
Her parents had once hosted a retreat at the Greenbrier in West Virginia.
She hadn’t been invited, though Patience, her husband, and her oldest brothers, Noah and Jacob, went along because they were adults by then and part of the whole thing.
Patience’s husband, Matthew, had wormed his way into her father’s inner circle, possibly the heir apparent, despite Noah and Jacob being the obvious picks.
Betty thought her dad liked the sick thrill of the three of them fighting harder and harder for his approval.
But anyway, the Greenbrier. For a long time, Betty thought maybe she imagined the memory of her mother packing her father’s suitcase while he read her the agenda of the retreat—something about loyalty tests, charitable donations, baptisms and blood oaths, which Betty thought she must have misunderstood.
But in the ensuing years, she’d digest that she heard everything exactly correctly.
She’d just been taught to question herself so often that she doubted her memory in so many ways.
Once she got to New York, a coworker at the Bloomingdale’s perfume counter went on and on about a boy she’d been dating who was a “total gaslighter,” and Betty, in her na?veté, had thought this meant that he, like, blew things up.
Which set her hair on end for obvious reasons.
When she asked her coworker if that was okay, someone who was into arson, her coworker had giggled and explained what she actually meant.
Oh dear, Betty remembered thinking, that was my entire childhood.
Tonight, she sighed and put the audition into her calendar. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Even Levi would agree that some risks were worth taking.
Awesome, thank you for thinking of me! she typed back to Natalie. I won’t let you down!
The bell clanged from the front door, and she hastily tucked her phone into her apron, grabbed some menus that weren’t too sticky and pushed out to the front.
“Surprise!” Caleb was standing by the hostess stand, wrapped in a gray scarf and navy pea coat and looking like an actual L.L.Bean model.
He didn’t know that of all the things Betty hated in life, surprises were number one.
“I skipped off of work early, grabbed a bottle of wine and thought I’d join you. ”
“It’s midnight,” she said, and hoped her voice wasn’t shaking. Her blood was pounding furiously in her ears. Betty had trained herself for no surprises, ever, even innocuous ones like this.
“Exactly! Do you know how rare it is for me to ditch work by midnight on a Wednesday?” Caleb worked in finance in some sort of job that Betty didn’t even pretend to understand.
She knew he made boatloads of money and worked grueling hours, which meant he was available only in limited gulps and for expensive meals. It suited Betty perfectly.
The diner was totally empty, so she couldn’t think of a reason he shouldn’t stay.
“We only have screw-top wine,” she said, gesturing at the bottle. “I don’t think I have anything to open that.”
“I was a Boy Scout,” he said, and pulled a corkscrew from his pocket. “I always come prepared.”
Something about her look must have given her away, that she had no idea what he was talking about.
“That was our motto,” he said. “Boy Scouts always come prepared. Your brothers weren’t ever scouts? Or you were never a Brownie? Oh my gosh, my sisters were so competitive over cookie sales.”
“No,” she said, and she heard herself. Clipped, tense. “They were never Boy Scouts.”
“Oh, well, all right, it actually was pretty nerdy. Don’t judge me.”
She liked this about Caleb, how he defused her live wire of tension.
She thought about how in elementary school, a few girls in her homeroom were Brownies.
How envious she was when they wore their uniforms, when they had badges on their sashes.
She asked Patience about it once, if she had gotten to do that when she was Betty’s age, and Patience looked horrified.
“Don’t ever mention that to Mom or Dad,” she’d whispered when they were in bed that night.
“Okay but—”
“No, just don’t, okay? I asked once. It’s not worth it.”
Patience didn’t have to elaborate. Betty was only seven or eight, but she well knew by then that her dad was mercurial, nearly dangerous. For a period back then she thought her mother could protect her, but later she’d learn that was as delusional as thinking she could join the Girl Scouts.
“Anyway, there’s that girls’ group at the church,” Patience had said, before rolling over and turning her back on Betty.
“That’s why Dad started it. To give girls something like that.
But for our own kind. He lets me lead the baking classes now, which is sort of like science, so it’s not so bad, it’s pretty good. ”
Tonight, Betty seated Caleb at a booth by the window, the one that Zeke, Sybil and Julian had opted for the very first night she met them.
“I’ll go get some mugs,” she said. “We don’t really have wineglasses.”
“And bring me your very best saltines.”
Betty had once told him the only thing she’d trust to eat there were the soup crackers.
That he remembered this felt like a small gift.
Almost no one remembered anything about Betty, which was exactly as she designed it, and she knew, she really did, that she couldn’t want more. But what if she did?
She thought of Levi. Of Patience. Of Noah.
Of Jacob. Of how she hid her bike in the woods because it was pitch black out, then walked into town and bought a bus ticket to Charleston with cash.
Of how she lingered on the edge of the tree line for a long minute, standing in the shadows, and watched the fire grow from something terrifying to something beautiful.
From Charleston, she made her way to Charlotte, eventually settling for a beat in Baltimore.
What if now she wanted more?
No, no.
More was dangerous. More was reckless.
If only that were enough to stop her from wanting it.