Chapter 54
Night Twenty-Two
Zeke
Arizona was miserable. Zeke hated that he was being trotted out to the press as some sort of comeback king.
He hated that the team had put him up in a cookie-cutter condo with the rest of the training staff in same building, that every single thing he did day in and day out revolved around his recovery, and if he wasn’t doing something involved with his recovery, he had multiple sets of eyes on him to course correct so that he was doing something that revolved around his recovery.
Timothy had set up camp for the time being at the Four Seasons and made daily check-ins, and when Zeke snapped that he didn’t need a babysitter, Timothy said that Zeke’s attitude was maybe half of the problem.
So they added in an extra day with the sports psychologist, who was also housed at the condo complex, which meant that every time Zeke left the apartment, he risked colliding with someone who was on the team’s payroll.
When his bloodwork came back with sky-high cortisol, he finally told the sports medicine doctor that he never slept, and a prescription was written on the spot.
Zeke didn’t think that a sleeping pill had cured the rot that caused the problem—and he resented that no one stopped to ask why his cortisol, the stress hormone, had blown through the roof.
But at least for the past four nights, it meant that he wasn’t staring at the ceiling and thinking of how he fucked things over completely with Sybil.
And how Betty might be, at best, in trouble, at worst, in danger.
He would wash the white pill down with a custom-blended electrolyte drink each night and wake up five hours later, disoriented that he had actually managed to sleep.
The first thing he would do, in the darkness of his bedroom before the sun rose, was check to see if Sybil had texted, emailed, called.
He would have taken a stupid Sudoku at this point.
He considered that he could be the one to bridge the divide, but he’d been brusque, overly harsh the night of their fight.
He knew she’d want an explanation, and he also knew he’d feel like a fool when he couldn’t offer one.
Sybil was not the type of woman to shrug her shoulders and accept half-formed apologies.
He thought about that night in the hospital, with a knife literally impaled in her toe.
How she still managed to keep her head on straight when Mark and his girlfriend appeared.
No, Zeke was now coming apart at the seams, and he didn’t want to drag Sybil into his open wounds. Georgia. That would have been the time to do something. To let her know how he felt. To kiss her. Maybe if he’d kissed her in Georgia, he wouldn’t be down here in Arizona without her.
He stepped out of the condo. It was still dark outside, and Zeke hadn’t adjusted to the snap of the cold desert in the morning.
His arm was sore from yesterday, and the air, even with his team fleece, seized his elbow like a vise.
He exhaled, and a plume of condensation from his breath dissipated.
The clock on his phone said 4:37 a.m. He realized that he had about two hours to steal away before anyone on his team would rise.
They reported to breakfast at 7:15 a.m., were at the weight room by eight.
Then it was swimming and cardio and massage and more weights, then some throwing time, then repeat repeat repeat.
Zeke was a cog in the wheel. An extremely well-paid cog in the wheel but still a cog.
He took a right out of the condo’s driveway.
The streets were empty, but he stayed on the sidewalks, a luxury of this particular spot of Arizonian suburbia.
He thought again about that trip to Georgia, but this time, about Betty.
He’d started listening to a book about how people get sucked into cults.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d read a book that didn’t have to do with anatomy or kinesiology or nutrition.
Timothy had spotted it on his phone on the plane, and said, “Jesus Christ, Zeke, you’re not in a fucking cult. It’s called the major leagues.”
At the time, Zeke had been a little embarrassed.
Maybe that he wasn’t intellectual enough to solve any of this.
Maybe Timothy was right in the implication that he was just an athlete whose brawn outmatched his brains.
In their partnership, Sybil had always been the brains, and maybe he’d gotten a little ahead of himself, thinking he could understand the psychology behind what Betty was running from.
It was ironic, Zeke thought now, what Timothy had said.
It hadn’t even occurred to him that he was indoctrinated, but maybe, in some ways, he was.
He’d been told that this was the only thing he was good for, made to believe that he had to dedicate his life to a cause that he wasn’t even sure he believed in anymore.
Or maybe no one had told him that. Maybe that wasn’t fair to his parents and Lani, who probably would have been fine if he coached Little League and worked as a UPS driver.
He was the one who had convinced himself this was the only place he had any worth, not anyone else.
He took a left down a street with oversized new builds.
He thought about Betty. How so few people are able to extricate themselves from situations such as hers; how maybe she did burn that fucking church down, and if she did, it was a triumph that she had freed herself.
He thought about that dickhead, Matthew, her sister’s husband, and how he expected reverence from a stranger in Georgia, when Zeke was always the one who had been revered.
Maybe that’s a little fucked up, too, Zeke thought, that he and Matthew weren’t all that different, but also, he and Betty weren’t either.
But something about all of it didn’t make sense.
Zeke couldn’t pin it down, and if he had the guts to call Sybil and apologize, surely she could.
He’d spent his entire career fine-tuning his instincts—when to wave off a pitch, when to brush the batter on the inside, when to go a little wild—and his instincts here said that Betty ran because she was scared, not because she was guilty.
Or maybe he was just a fool who had deluded himself into thinking his instincts counted for something.
Maybe they counted for jack shit. He hadn’t moved out of the way of Schmidt’s line drive when he could have. So.
The sun was coming up by the time he got back to the condo. Back to being a cog in the wheel. But whatever clue he was missing still pricked him, a splinter in the sole of his foot. If Betty didn’t do it, he thought, who did?