Chapter 56
Night Twenty-Three
Betty
Betty probably wouldn’t have run if Sybil hadn’t told her about Julian that night.
Even now, five weeks later, with sharpened cheekbones and still-jet-black hair, on a thinning sheet at the hostel a few miles from the bus depot, Betty found herself right back outside the diner, with Sybil’s voice echoing on the other end of the line. Breaking the news.
Betty had thought maybe she was imagining someone following her at Grand Central the night she met Caleb, spinning something out of nothing.
So she’d ignored her intuition that she had run out her clock in Manhattan.
But Julian’s death? Betty didn’t have the luxury to believe in coincidences, not anymore.
About a year before Levi left—was kicked out—he started tiptoeing into her room late at night.
They were the only two kids left in the house; the other three were married; offspring abounded.
Betty had eight nieces and nephews by the time she was sixteen, her siblings taking seriously her father’s edict that marriage was intended for procreation.
For those few years, just the two of them, they were lucky to each have their own bedroom.
And if her dad caught Levi in hers, that would be the end of it.
No fraternizing between genders, even siblings, was allowed in private.
Her father had gotten even more fanatical about that recently, inventing new rules whenever one struck him.
“You know one day, he’s going to either kill me or boot me,” Levi said. He was stretched out on her bed, his legs extending a foot past hers.
“Shhh,” Betty whispered. Her dad was prone to popping up in doorways these days, his eyes lingering on her, his face a mix of something like consternation and wistfulness, if wistfulness had a knife’s edge to it.
“Dad’s not even here,” he said. “You know he goes back out at night, right, once Mom is asleep?”
Betty did know. She tried not to think about it.
Not because she didn’t think that her dad was capable of being deceitful.
But because she worried that he would see through her, see into her heart, which was rotting on the edges and turning black with rage, and then he’d punish her the way he punished Levi.
“You also know that I’m leaving soon, right?” He turned his head to the right, and she turned hers to the left.
“Maybe not. Maybe he’ll let you stay.”
“I don’t want to stay, Bets. And you shouldn’t want to either.”
“I don’t,” she whispered.
“Then we need to come up with a plan.”
Every few nights, he slipped into her room and prepared her.
When you have a chance to run, take it.
Stow money.
Be inconspicuous.
Don’t stay anywhere too long.
Be careful who you trust.
And when you can, find me.
“He might just let me leave,” she said. “All on my own.”
“You’re his youngest daughter, the last of his creations, the one who is supposed to carry on his promise in the name of God,” he whispered. “Or whatever. Something like that.”
“Patience can do that,” she said. She felt him shake his head.
“You haven’t been listening in to his sermons lately, have you?”
Admittedly, she had not. She sat in the pew and thought about how increasingly absurd her father looked at the pulpit, red-faced and shouting with spittle flying from his mouth. He was almost cartoonish, almost like he was the one possessed by demons, not the rest of them.
“He’s been preaching more and more about the sanctity of the children, their path to righteousness in the name of their father.”
“He’s always done that,” she said.
“No, not like this, not about daughters being carved out of their father’s rib, not about them paying homage to their fathers to get to the gates of heaven. Don’t you see the way he looks at you now? How whenever you are in the same room together, he never lets you out of his sight?”
Betty had only recently gone through puberty, a late bloomer at fifteen.
Now, on the cusp of sixteen, she unavoidably did catch her dad eyeing her, even in her itchy, modest clothing, the way her breasts couldn’t be tamped down, the way her dress hugged the curve of her hips.
He wasn’t leering; he was instead irritable, like her womanliness offended him.
Betty had been too na?ve to make the connection.
“You think he’s speaking to me?”
“Well, I don’t think he’s speaking to me,” Levi said.
“I don’t want to get married,” Betty confessed. “Not at eighteen, not to someone Dad has chosen.”
“You won’t have to,” he said with such assurance that she believed him completely.
Six weeks later, she found the flip phone under her pillow. Two months after that, Levi was gone.
Betty had gotten sloppy in New York, falling a little bit in love with the Insomniacs, falling a little bit in like with Caleb.
Shooting that stupid commercial. Even if it had been local.
Even if it had been for five thousand dollars.
Now, someone could turn on their television, see her face and easily trace her back to New York.
To the casting agency. Who knows what from there.
She wasn’t sure how Julian was involved, how he’d gotten wrapped up in her mess, but she knew in her bones that it wasn’t a coincidence.
Betty showered at the hostel, the water lukewarm, and found a diner down the block.
She hadn’t treated herself to a warm meal in days, partially to conserve money, partially because she thought she had seen someone with a shadowy resemblance to her dad in St. Louis, and even though she knew it was her brain again, playing a trick, she raced back to her motel, grabbed her bag and hoofed it to the bus station.
Glancing over her shoulder the entire time.
She forked the eggs, marginally better than the ones from her former place of employment.
She sat at a booth with an expansive window by the street, so she could see all the passersby, and thought about St. Louis again.
It couldn’t have been him. It wasn’t him.
She snapped a piece of bacon between her teeth.
But the seed of doubt had rooted itself.
It was untenable, living like this forever.
She could alter her hair color, give herself a new nickname, switch jobs, change cities.
But it wasn’t tenable to do this forever.
She was weary in a way that she felt on a cellular level.
Her purple welts beneath her eyes were puffy and protruding; her skin was sallow, her brain misfiring on occasion, which could have been the leftover trauma, but could have also been that your body can sustain a level of fear for only so long before it collapses.
She checked her phone again. She knew Levi wasn’t going to call her back on this line because he was too disciplined.
But she had to check anyway. Her fingers floated over Caleb’s number, then Sybil’s, then Zeke’s.
But she worried they were angry with her, at how she had left, and more critically, she worried that reaching out to any of them could draw her into more of a trap, as with Julian.
She’d ignored or deleted all of their initial texts and calls, and eventually, they stopped calling.
She told herself this was for the best, for their own sake, but she wanted to just this once think about her sake. She couldn’t be an island forever.
She left a twenty-dollar bill on her table, a luxury she couldn’t necessarily afford, but she’d once been a diner waitress too. Now she was an anonymous traveler moving through the city, like anyone else.
But she wasn’t like anyone else.
She was her father’s daughter. Her brother’s sister.
Elizabeth Jones was ready to live life on her own terms, tired of being that anonymous traveler wafting through cities, through life, always looking behind her. She was ready to end things so that she could start looking forward, shoulders straight, face toward the sun.