Chapter 53
Night Twenty-Two
Sybil
Sybil hadn’t really expected Mark to follow through with the list of landmarks, so she spent the next few nights falling down rabbit holes online in an attempt to track down the sites that matched the postcards, but she was frustratingly coming up short.
Nothing about Wheaties at all. So when that proved fruitless, she couldn’t stop herself from googling Zeke and reading an article in The Arizona Republic about his move to Phoenix in preparation for spring training.
Timothy was quoted, as was the manager of the Mets, all prophesying optimism, a roaring return, a sure thing in the lineup by opening day, but notably, Zeke was absent in any line, any word of the article.
There was a picture of him in the training room at the Mets’ facility taken by the paper’s photographer, so Zeke had signed off on the piece, but when Sybil zoomed in on his face—and she zoomed and zoomed and stared and stared—he looked stony, the Zeke she had witnessed the night of their fight.
Not the Zeke she’d known all the nights before that.
She lingered on the photo longer than she should have.
He hadn’t reached out in a week, and Sybil knew that was more about him than it was about her, but still, it stung.
She had thought they were friends. For a while there, maybe even more than friends.
In Georgia, yes, his assistant had booked separate hotel rooms, but when they checked in, he had lingered at the front desk, the question forming, an unusual uncertainty between them.
She got so flustered that she blurted out, “Reservation for Rodriguez, two rooms,” and she saw, out of the corner of her eye because she absolutely could not look anywhere but straight ahead, Zeke deflate ever so slightly.
Or maybe she wanted to see if he would deflate ever so slightly.
It was dawning on her that she was going to be single for the back half of her life, and the thought of meeting someone new, of casual sex, was less thrilling, more daunting than she’d considered when she’d announced to the kids at Thanksgiving that Mark was fucking Vivian.
She stood. Poured herself a glass of white wine from a bottle that Natalie had dropped off when she told her about Mark’s drop-in.
Natalie hadn’t had to ask if Sybil was reconsidering the divorce because that wasn’t what this was about.
She took only one look at her and said, “Bastards, who needs them.”
It had started to snow outside, and Sybil could tell by the way her excess frenetic energy was radiating through her that it was going to be an entirely sleepless night.
She’d adjusted, as much as a human could, to a few hours here and there, to drifting off at one a.m. and waking at four a.m. Tonight, she already knew even that was out of the question.
She opened the patio door, grabbed two logs from the stack that Mark had brought home from the hardware store earlier in the fall at the first hint of chillier weather.
She started a fire with ease, one stroke of a match on the kindling and newspaper.
Her mother had taught her self-sufficiency, and she nearly laughed out loud at how her self-sufficiency had hardened, then morphed into something akin to loneliness.
She considered that maybe this was why she was so dogged in finding Betty, in helping her.
Maybe Betty’s own self-sufficiency had also hardened; maybe Betty was lonely now too.
She folded herself in front of the fire with Pluto stretched in his dog bed, snoring, then drained her wineglass. Just as she rose to pour a refill, her phone pinged with a text.
Mark: hey, sorry this took so long, Jasper’s been in Switzerland
Sybil: naturally
Mark: still nursing that grudge?
Sybil: no grudge, he just refused to call me Dr all through our residency
Mark: that’s a grudge, syb
Sybil: he’s a misogynist, so then yes
Mark: no wonder Eloise turned to women’s studies, she got it from her mom
Sybil muttered, “Fuck off,” but smiled because he was right.
Eloise wasn’t going to pursue medicine, but maybe Sybil had imbued her with the exact right amount of self-sufficiency.
Enough to tell her meddling mother that she needed to chart a course of her own, but not so much that she didn’t see the bigger picture.
Sybil didn’t know how you could be a women’s studies major and not consider the bigger picture.
Now that she thought about it, and yes, it could have been the glass of wine warm in her belly, she was utterly delighted at Eloise’s decision.
Sybil: i’ll text her, tell her that I expect her to be a supreme court justice
Mark: sybil
Sybil: i’m joking
Mark: i have to head to the hospital—on call—but here’s the list.
An attachment landed in the text box.
Mark: It wasn’t Wheaties, sorry, my bad.
It was Fodor’s. Remember how we were fanatical about that guide for our honeymoon?
Anyway, I’d forgotten, Jasper told me, how Fodor’s had a contest with National Geographic where if you took pictures in front of each landmark and sent them in, they were doing a giveaway of free guides for life.
So not postcards either. My bad. Memory is going in our old age, I guess.
Sybil wasn’t surprised that he’d gotten it wrong. But she was a little surprised that he admitted it.
Sybil: so you entered?
Mark: no, we totaled the car, remember?
Of course they had. She’d forgotten some of Mark’s stories, as if once he vacated her life, she was able to open up a little more space for new information.
She clicked on the attachment, sent it to her printer.
Mark had been right about some of it though.
She held the list up against the wall of postcards.
She and Zeke had sorted them by postmark, but now that she had an actual road map, she could see that this was more than just a nomadic brother who sent a postcard every four months or so from a new state.
This was a brother who was telling her where she could find him.
Or at least that’s how Sybil would have done it.
Send a coded message, let her know he would stay for a while, let her know that he was one beacon shining in the darkness if she needed it.
But why go to such lengths? Sybil knew about their draconian father.
She knew about the fire and Patience and Matthew.
Were Betty and Levi running because they had started it?
No, Levi was long gone by then. To confirm, she stripped the postcards from the wall, flipped each of them over.
They dated back six years ago, starting in Washington, DC, the National Mall.
Sybil traced through the next few and landed on Niagara Falls, early June of 2021.
She already knew the date of the fire but retrieved Annabeth’s article from The Macon Telegraph anyway.
Overlooking details could be the difference between life and death on the operating table.
Or on a Dateline episode. How many cases had gone cold because investigators were three degrees too sloppy?
Sybil had never been three degrees too sloppy, unless she considered her feelings for Zeke, which weren’t so much sloppy as they were reckless.
How foolish she was, how stupid she felt.
The fire destroyed the church and killed four people on June 11th.
The postmark from Niagara Falls was June 8th.
Ostensibly, Sybil realized, Levi could have made it home to Georgia.
Sybil fought the urge to text Zeke and tell him that maybe they got everything wrong.
That they hadn’t considered that Levi and Betty could be running because they conspired to burn it down together.