Chapter 52
Night Twenty-One
Betty
Betty had actually managed to fall asleep on the bus, lulled by the rhythm of the tires against the pavement.
She was woken by her seatmate, a boy about her age dressed in military garb, who gently nudged her leg and said, “Hey, we’re here.
” He looked a bit like Caleb, whom she was trying not to think of.
“You need a ride somewhere?” he said. “My buddy is picking me up, lives outside the city.”
He was harmless, even kind. But Betty couldn’t afford to trust strangers. Not right now. She grabbed her bag from the overhead bin and was on her way.
The bus depot wasn’t too far out from the heart of the city.
She’d been prudent with her money in the past five weeks.
Staying in hostels, relying on public transport, eating only to feed her hunger, not for anything pleasurable or greedy.
Sometimes, when her stomach clenched, she thought of what she had left behind: the platters of food in Zeke’s kitchen, the open-fridge policy where just about anything she ever craved was on hand, and if not, his assistant would track it down.
She thought about Thanksgiving, the headiness of cider and rosemary and garlic that turned on all of her senses at Sybil’s house.
But that girl, the indulgences she allowed herself, she had to be erased for now.
She had never been this far west before.
The outside air was chilly and dry, but not nearly as biting as New York.
Tolerable, even though the temperature must have been below freezing.
She hauled her backpack over her shoulders and decided she would walk to the hostel.
She could have afforded a cab—a splurge, sure—but the few miles would do her legs good.
Also, she couldn’t be too careful. The walk would allow her to check behind her every so often, ensure that she wasn’t being followed.
She’d paid a barber in Cleveland to chop her hair into a bob and dye it a muted pink.
In Chicago, where her lips nearly turned blue from the wind chill, she paid someone else to color it Raggedy Ann red.
Somewhere in Iowa, she couldn’t even remember the town, she went espresso black.
That was three weeks ago, and she stuck with it, like its harshness suited her.
But also, she hadn’t been given reason to think that anyone was trailing her, so she left it for now.
Of course, she hadn’t thought anyone was trailing her in New York either.
Sometimes, she’d wake up after a few hours of fitful sleep in whichever bed, whichever town she’d landed in and wonder if she’d misremembered: the warning of run, Sybil’s phone call about Julian.
In Omaha, she’d spent an afternoon in the public library googling Julian’s name to be sure that maybe this wasn’t a wild fever dream, that maybe she hadn’t lost touch with reality.
It wouldn’t be unheard of, she knew, that a child of a cult leader had distorted memories, had fits of paranoia and delusion.
Tucked in a library cube with a desktop computer and their free Wi-Fi, she hesitated, nearly googling the Revivalist Church but unwilling to stomach whatever the results now were, whatever complicity her sister was tied to, whatever conspiracy Matthew was surely involved in.
How had it been four years since she’d last seen Patience?
The night of the fire, her sister was in charge of Sabbath dinner, tasked with setting up the refectory, aligning the place mats and the servingware and the decor.
Their dad had always been fanatical about the dinners, or rather, in hindsight, fanatical about the appearance at these dinners, as he welcomed in church outsiders under the guise of breaking bread with strangers.
But more often than not, he used the time to recruit the more gullible into the church.
That afternoon of the fire, Patience was in the main kitchen; she had her younger child on one hip and another, her middle son, who sat cross-legged at her feet, with damp cheeks, wet eyes but not making a sound.
Betty and her siblings had been routinely punished for tantrums as kids, and she’d spent enough time around Matthew to know that his tolerance for outbursts was nonexistent.
Children were meant to tame their inner demons, meant to act godly at all times.
Anything less was disrespectful to their elders.
Betty knelt in front of her nephew. Outstretched her arms. “It’s okay, buddy, come on.”
His round eyes peered toward his mother before he agreed to an embrace. Patience, lost in the trail of a thought, only just saw Betty there when he did.
“Elizabeth, get up,” she said to her sister, not her son.
“What?”
“Stand up, John needs to learn his lesson.”
“His lesson for what?” Betty did stand but glanced toward John. “Johnny, what did you do?”
Patience rested her hand on her arm. “It doesn’t matter. Matthew says that explaining yourself when you’ve done wrong doesn’t absolve you of what you did.”
“Patience,” Betty said, “he’s three.” Her sister looked exhausted, but Betty noticed she was now allowed to wear a hint of mascara and her nails were painted a very soft pink. Progress, perhaps, in softening her father. Or maybe Patience was rebelling. Betty liked that option better.
“I like your nails,” she said. “I didn’t realize we could—”
Patience looked down at her own hands as if they weren’t her own.
“You should go,” Patience said quietly. “You need to clean up before the Sabbath.”
Betty was in dark blue jeans and an itchy knotted deep forest green sweater, too hot for the June weather, that she’d taken from Levi’s room, which was still untouched from when he left.
Her father had lifted the onerous dress code only a few months earlier, and though she had a few new items in her closet, she often had to improvise to look even remotely normal at school.
She still had to cover all of her skin, but at least it wasn’t those heavy woolly dresses that suffocated every pore.
Before she could insist on helping, her father appeared, and Patience’s spine shot even straighter.
John bit his lip, his little nostrils expanding and compressing with each breath, but otherwise frozen in his concentrated effort not to disturb his grandfather.
Her dad took a singular look at Betty, her androgynous clothing, her hair wild and matted after a day at school, and clicked his tongue.
“Disappointing,” he said, and Betty’s breathing quickened.
A laundry list of things she wished she could say in return, a laundry list of ways she wanted to cut him down to size sprung to mind.
She, of course, said nothing. Saying something meant at best a diatribe, at worst, the back of his hand.
“I expect you to be my very best one, Elizabeth,” he added.
“I told her,” Patience replied. “I told her to go home.” Then she turned her back toward Betty and proceeded into the refectory with her daughter still on her hip, a vase of flowers in one hand, and her son, terrified, still sitting on the cool linoleum floor.
Later, when she replayed this memory at the library in Omaha and even again afterward, she wasn’t certain of much of it.
She was pretty sure that Patience had recoiled when reminded of Johnny’s age; she was pretty sure that her father had reprimanded her appearance even though he was the one who had modified the rules; she was pretty certain Patience had soft pink nail polish on.
But trust, even in herself, was slippery, a minnow in a porous net.
Maybe none of that had happened. Maybe her trauma and her sleeplessness had turned her brain inside out, embedding memories that were actually fiction.
At the library, Google landed on Julian’s obituary.
She didn’t know what she expected, like she or Sybil or Zeke would be mentioned, but it was short and concise.
She thought he would like that: the brevity.
Clean lines, no fluff. Most important, it was confirmation that she hadn’t panicked, that reality wasn’t blurring into something vaguer.
Julian had been struck by a car near his apartment.
The walk to the hostel took forty-five minutes.
She tried Levi again along the way. She’d swapped out the sim card of her phone as soon as she left New York, so she didn’t expect him to pick up any more than she expected him to answer when she tried him at Thanksgiving.
He’d been crystal clear: use the flip phone; anything else he blocked or would assume was too risky to answer.
But in her haste to leave, she’d left the flip phone, their only meaningful lifeline for six years, at Zeke’s.
She kept trying; he kept not answering.
She reached the hostel, home for the next few nights while she regrouped, showered, tried to rest, whatever that meant these days.
She stood beneath the glow of the vacancy sign for a long beat, turned around once more to be triple-certain no one had followed her.
Then she stared up at the vast, star-filled sky.
He was out there somewhere underneath the same expanse of galaxies. She was getting closer.