Chapter 42
Night Sixteen
Zeke
They’d found the reporter’s contact information, and Sybil crafted an email, which Zeke then sent from his team account, a New York Mets email address.
He included his cell number, as if that might also lure her in, a personal connection to the Mets superstar.
He thought his name alone would be enough to merit a reply because that was how things usually worked with a Zeke Rodriguez introduction, but it had been three hours and nothing.
“Zeke, it’s the middle of the night, you have to stop checking,” Sybil had said.
Of course he needed to stop checking. He was just used to, well, getting everything, having everything.
Everyone adjusting their posture when he walked into the room, everyone asking what they could do to accommodate him.
This was what it was like, he supposed, to have a life stripped of his fame.
This, perhaps, was the change he was looking for when he froze as that line drive careened right into his arm.
“I just want to be able to do something,” he said. “Now.”
Sybil was on her phone playing one of her puzzles that Zeke had given up on.
Forget that she always beat him, Zeke didn’t mind that one bit.
But without Julian, the whole thing felt empty, or if not empty, a reminder that maybe Julian didn’t consider them friends, that Zeke and Sybil were a means to an end, not the good stuff in the middle.
Zeke was almost embarrassed that Julian had used them so seamlessly.
Even though Zeke was well aware that he quite often was not the smartest one in the room, he didn’t need it to be pointed out either.
“You’re stewing,” Sybil said, and set her phone facedown on the couch. “About Betty or about Julian?” She could read him so well, Zeke thought, a sea of gratefulness washing over him.
“Both? Him? I’m not sure.”
“You think that none of it was real? Our…situation? Our friendships?”
Zeke moved toward the couch and sat next to her.
“You don’t?”
Sybil stood, and he fought the urge to reach out to her, grab her hand, pull her back beside him.
She gazed up at the Christmas tree, then walked toward one side and adjusted an ornament that was askew.
She turned back toward him with the glow of the fairy lights illuminating her from behind, and his heart seized.
He knew she wasn’t his; he knew that the bond between them could be as make-believe as it had been with Julian and Betty.
But it had been so long, seemingly forever, since he’d trusted someone wholly, wanted someone wholly, the way that he did Sybil.
“I think that it seems like they each had their reasons for…this.” She raised an arm and dropped it.
“Maybe Betty was in trouble. Maybe Julian thought he could help her. Or maybe Julian was going to cause her more trouble. I don’t know.
But I’m not sure we should take any of that personally.
Everything started a long time before we met them. ”
Zeke clenched and unclenched his hand. Sometimes now, his fingers went a little tingly.
His PT assured him that was normal, just the nerves rebuilding their pathways.
But maybe it wasn’t just his nerves. His eyelid still had a mind of its own.
He knew that Sybil had noticed, and he also knew that she wouldn’t point it out.
Their bodies were betraying them in ways they couldn’t control, and it was just another thing they had in common, another humiliation of their sleeplessness.
“It’s hard not to feel like we were duped,” he said.
“That it wasn’t real?”
Zeke shrugged.
“I think it was real,” she said, then her eyes never wavering from his, said, “I think it is real.”
Zeke felt his pulse quicken. He so wanted to believe that she meant him, this, them, that whatever was building, even unspoken, between them was important and vital and unquestionable. It was. It had to be. But he wasn’t brave enough yet to ask or to articulate his own assuredness.
Sybil returned to the couch right next to him. He adjusted his body, a leg up on the cushion, to face her. “Maybe this is an opportunity,” she said.
“We’re not starting our own podcast,” he said, and she rolled her eyes but smiled, which delighted him.
“Okay, but that would be pretty amazing, right? True Crime with Zeke Rodriguez,” she said.
“Given how much better you are at this than I am, I’m pretty sure it would be True Crime with Sybil Bowman and Occasional Interruptions from a Former Mets Player.”
Sybil laughed, but then her face fell. “I really hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Insult yourself, like you’re not valuable.”
“I’m valuable,” Zeke said. “To my team.”
“You’re valuable,” Sybil answered. “To me.”
That thing from before—hope, he realized—bubbled up again, and he was suddenly acutely aware that his breath had gotten heavier. He met Sybil’s gaze, but she broke it just as quickly, then was back on her feet. Fuck. She moved back to the tree, stared up at the bright golden star on top.
“Do you think Betty could have killed someone?” she asked finally.
“I mean, who knows what any of us is capable of,” Zeke said.
“Right, I know.” She faced him. “I’d kill someone for my kids. I just would, no questions asked.”
“Maybe, uh, killing her parents is how she thought she could escape? Like, the cult? Is that weird, to say that Betty was in a cult? I feel like that’s…ridiculous. Like, are people actually in cults?”
“Do you want to hear how many podcasts I’ve listened to about that? Because it’s upward of a hundred.” Sybil shook her head. “Wow, I really have way too much time on my hands.” She reached for her phone. “This is what Wikipedia told me about the Revivalist Church.”
Founded by Samuel Jones, the father of six daughters and one son, Aaron, in 1979, the Revivalist Church was a fringe offshoot of the Worldwide Church of Believers, an already extremist church that had, prior to its shuttering, hundreds of thousands of followers.
An estimated several hundred parishioners followed Jones from Tennessee to his new outpost in Georgia, where he implemented even stricter guidelines than the WCB and continued to grow his following.
“Hold on, let me skip ahead, there’s a lot of religious stuff.” Sybil swiped her phone and scrolled. “Oh here, this is what leads me to Betty.”
Women were mandated to be married on their 18th birthdays, and their purpose was to bear children and be their husband’s caretaker.
While girls attended public schools so as not to draw attention from local law enforcement, once they were of age, higher education was forbidden, as was marrying outside the sect.
“Betty is twenty-two,” Sybil said.
“And the fire was four and a half years ago,” Zeke replied.
“Does she seem like the type who wanted to be married at eighteen?”
“No,” Zeke said. “She certainly does not. So, I mean, not to sound ridiculous, but that’s a motive.”
“Or maybe that’s justice,” Sybil replied. “Because if it were me, maybe I’d do the exact same thing.”
“Do you think Julian agreed? And was just ensuring that she didn’t get caught?”
“He has a daughter.”
“But he was FBI, Sybil. Granted, I’ve never had a face-to-face with them, but he doesn’t seem like the type to just…overlook that. And if he just wanted the case to be closed, that had already happened, right?”
“So you think she ran because she’s guilty,” Sybil said.
Zeke detected a very slight twinge of judgment in her voice, the very first of its kind in any of their conversations.
He didn’t want to be judged by this woman whose opinion he had come very much to respect.
More than respect, to crave. He craved Sybil’s approval.
If he were sitting down with the mandated sports psychologist right now, surely, she would ask him why; she might suggest that Sybil’s approval was simply a replacement for a coach’s approval, for parental approval, for forty thousand screaming Mets fans’ approval.
Then he said something that surprised him, something he knew Sybil didn’t want to hear.
“I think she ran,” he said, “because she doesn’t want to be found. And you need to face that maybe it’s okay if we leave it that way.”
Sybil’s head reared back. “We can’t just leave it that way.”
“Why? What if she left for her own reasons?” As soon as he articulated it, he realized that he believed this to be true.
Perhaps Betty’s reasons to blow up her life and Zeke’s reasons to blow up his career weren’t all that different.
Perhaps they just wanted out. And with no other escape routes, they chose detonation.
“Zeke!” Sybil’s voice was a little higher, a little tighter now. He’d only ever heard her this way when she was speaking to Mark. He didn’t like it one bit, but he didn’t feel like backing down. “Betty is in trouble. She needs us.”
He stood, took his time and stretched. His arm didn’t reverberate with pain the way that it used to, and that should have made him happy or maybe that should have made him scared. When he stopped in the moment to consider it, though, it made him feel almost nothing at all.
“I don’t know if she needs us, Sybil. We want to think she does. But maybe Betty knows what she’s doing. Maybe she left for a reason. Maybe we don’t know what those reasons are because she didn’t want us to. Maybe we have to live with that.”
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“Why is it that your opinion simply overrules mine?” He didn’t mean to get so pissed, but actually, he was suddenly extremely pissed.
“My opinion doesn’t overrule yours,” she said. “But you’re implying that we just leave this alone. I can’t do that.”
“Why? Why can’t you do that? If Betty has been on her own for four years because she wants her freedom, why would you be the one to stop that?
” He was yelling now because this was as much about him as it was Betty.
“I actually don’t even know what we’re doing here!
Don’t you think, if she wanted our help, she would have asked? ”
“Zeke!” Sybil said louder again, but he was already down the hall, heading toward his bedroom. He couldn’t have explained why he was looking for a fight, but sensed that throwing a punch would be gratifying, might dissolve the hurricane of tension threatening to combust inside of him.