Save the Enemy (20 page)

“I’m P.F. Greenawalt,” he says.

“Yeah, right,” I say, as quietly as I can. Suddenly tears spring to my eyes. Yay emotional rollercoaster. “You and that other guy. The one who tried to kill me. Why did he try to kill me?”

“I …” He pauses. “Things are very complicated, Zoey.”

“No shit,” I say. My nose is running, and I feel in my pockets for a tissue. No tissue, but yes gun. Somehow I’d forgotten the gun. I wipe my nose on my sleeve, all classy-like.

“Everything I told you before was true,” he says.

“Yeah? Yeah? Well, maybe. But even if so, I feel there were some serious omissions,” I say, emboldened by the gun. “Yes, that’s my feeling. I’d like some explanation of. Jesus, P.F. Everything. Why is my dog here? Why are
you
here? Why am
I
here! Where
is
my dog?”

“Be quiet,” P.F. hisses. “This isn’t a joke.”

“I’m not laughing,” I say, though I am laughing a little, but not a funny haha laugh, just a HEY I’M CONFUSED AND SCARED sort of laugh.

Then P.F. starts laughing. Which makes me laugh harder. And suddenly the two of us are standing in front
of the bathroom cracking up. Totally inappropriately. The laughing bout stops all of a sudden. There’s nothing funny going on here. And Molly has been quiet for a long goddamn time.

I call through the door, “Moll? You okay? Do you need more toilet paper or something?”

No answer.

P.F. knocks on the door. He looks
uncomfortable
. “Ahem. Pardon. Can I help with anything? Well, not help with anything going on in there. But with anything in
general
?”

“You could get my dad,” I say. He doesn’t respond. Neither does Molly.

P.F. tries the handle. Nothing. He pounds on the door. Nothing.

I think, for a moment, that I could offer to shoot the door open. I don’t. P.F. goes out to retrieve a screwdriver. He comes back, unscrews the door handle. Pushes the door. Wind wafts over our tense faces. The bathroom window is open. Molly is gone.

“This is bad,” P.F. says. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I genuinely don’t. I still really have to use the bathroom, too.

“You can wait in here if you want while I go,” I say, bobbing up and down, hoping P.F. doesn’t take me up on this.

“I’ll wait right here,” he says. “DON’T try anything funny. Shit.”

Well, yes. I close the knob-less door. Compose myself. Hope no one can see/is looking in through the hole in the door. Gaze out the open window. It opens out to a yard so big I can’t see its boundaries. I can see what looks like a swimming pool, a ways away, which I guess could work as a Red Sea stand-in if we needed the great man upstairs to drown
some enemies. And maybe a guest house past that? Is Molly in the guest house? Going for a swim?

After making an orchestra of humiliating noises, after which I do feel a little better in the tummy, though nowhere else, I wash up, using the pleasant-smelling soaps, and the single-use hand towels in this big marble bathroom.

“MOLLY!” I call out the window. No response. “MOOOOLLLLLLYYYYYY,” I try again, like she’s a dog who’s run off after a squirrel. My dog. I need to go find my dog again. My brother. Pete. Find Pete. Find out what our plans are. I’m certainly not the one making the plans. Just following. As best I can.

“They’ve sent someone after her,” P.F. says to me when I come out of the bathroom. “You have to hope she’s good at hiding now. That’s the only hope.”

I gaze at him. I feel my mouth hanging open, my eyes blinking too slowly.

“Pull yourself together, Zoey,” he says in his nasal voice. “I told you this is serious.”

“Who’s gone after her?” I ask.

“Another of the P.F.s,” he says. “We don’t have time now. Just trust me, Zoey. You have to if you’re going to get through this.”

I don’t trust him,
obviously
, but I have to follow when he guides me through a massive granite and stainless kitchen to a screened-in room at the back of the house. It’s blocked off with a sliding glass door. It seems like such a cozy addition to this kind of cold, impressive living space. I think I can see a fire burning in a fireplace. I can definitely see Pete, standing, gesticulating. He looks furious. I can hear him, sort of. Moving closer, I can hear more.

“I
know
you think I’m incompetent and I
know
you think
you should have sent Abby instead of me. I don’t
care
. I’m
tired
of trying to impress you. I
know
you think I’m a fuckup, Mom, and you always will. Well, so who cares. At least I’m not
evil
, Mom. At least I’m not evil.”

Roscoe barks. I then see that Mrs. Severy is sitting on a floral couch. Roscoe is sitting at her feet. She’s elegant, in the middle of this, and still has my dog.

Ben is sitting on a matching floral loveseat, kitty corner to Mrs. Severy’s.

P.F. slides the door open. We come into the room.

“What’s going on?” I ask, looking from person to person.

Mrs. Severy takes a deep, exasperated breath. “My son is explaining to me that I find him a disappointment and always have,” she says. “It’s ridiculous.”

“It’s
true
, Mom!” he shouts.

“Keep your voice down,” she says. “You’re not a disappointment. You’re my son. However, you promised you could take care of things. You haven’t. Now I’ll have to pick up the pieces. Tie up the loose ends.”

“Zoey isn’t a loose end, Mother,” he says.

Well, what?

“In fact she is, Peter,” says Mrs. Severy. “Both these children are.”

“I thought you’d be reasonable,” Pete says. He sounds desperate. His voice has a little squeak to it.

I’m hovering near the door. I’d like to collect my dog and my brother and get
out of here
, but I’m just hovering. Timid. Always so timid. I wasn’t raised to be timid, I just turned out that way. Can’t play lacrosse. Can’t collect my dog and save my brother and my father and my friend and Jesus, there are a lot of people who need saving right now.

“I thought you’d be mature enough to fulfill your
responsibilities,” says Mrs. Severy. She uncrosses her legs at the ankles. Shifts in the sofa. P.F. starts to move as well. He turns his head to look at Ben. He pulls out a gun.

Without realizing I’m going to do it, or else probably the timidity would hold me back, I run at him. I can hear my dad’s voice in my head: “Use your shoulder, aim for the soft middle, but high enough that you will make your opponent unsteady.” I don’t even know if Dad was
right
, but this is the best I can do. I aim for P.F.’s padded middle. I make contact. I hear a gunshot, then Ben’s quiet voice, which says, so simply, so devastatingly, “Zoey, I’m hurt.”

I run to my brother. He’s lying on the couch, not moving. There’s blood on his jacket. I’m looking at his head, his chest, his stomach, his neck, trying not to touch or jostle him too much or upset him more.

“Where are you hurt, honey?” I say to Ben. He doesn’t respond. “Why did you do this to him?” I cry out to P.F.

“We have to
run
,” Pete says. “Zoey, we have to run right now.”

“I don’t know where he’s hurt,” I say to Pete. I look at Mrs. Severy, who continues to sit on the couch, somewhat imperviously, imperiously. Roscoe’s nose is in the air. He is staring in our direction. He must want to come over to us. He must. He doesn’t come.

P.F. is back on his feet, one hand holding the small of his back, which I suppose hurts since he’s old and old people’s backs always hurt when they fall. With his other hand, he’s pointing the gun at Pete still.

“I’m going to need you to come with me,” P.F. is saying, wincing at the same time.

“Shut up,” I say. Then I scream it. “SHUT UP.”

I turn back to my brother. I can tell he’s disassociating. He used to do this a lot when he was younger, before they got the meds right. It’s part of why he needed so many doctors, so many diagnoses. When a situation would get stressful, he’d react either by becoming madly destructive—breaking plates, throwing things, pulling his own hair out, punching whatever was around—or by disassociating. Becoming comatose, basically. Losing track of the world.

Sometimes those two states would work in tandem. He’d go into a dissociative lapse and be destructive while he’d be like that, then not remember it afterwards. Dad described it as a sort of “fugue state.” He liked to add that many geniuses went into such “fugue states” while they were at their most productive. Which didn’t seem too applicable in our case, unless you considered smashing every water glass in the house as being Ben’s “most productive.”

He doesn’t do either much anymore. Meds helped. Then through some cognitive therapy, Ben learned self-calming techniques like deep breathing and self-analysis, and a bit of chilling the hell out, which got him off the meds. That’s how we’ve gotten away with this irregular schedule during Dad’s disappearance, and our search for Dad, and all the new people, and none of his regular diet. I guess being shot at Pete’s mom’s house while we’re madly trying to find Dad has been a step beyond what self-calming can really take care of.

P.F. starts talking again, as I’m still trying to go over my brother, find out where he’s hurt, find out how hurt he is. I’ve got the buzzy feeling in my head, but I’m also focusing, focusing on Ben, focusing on solving this
one problem
because
I can’t handle more than one shot-brother-sized problem at a time.

“You’re going to have to come with me,” he’s saying.

I pull the gun out of my jacket pocket and point it back at him. “I don’t think that’s the case,” I say. “I think that isn’t the case at all.”

I’ve never used a gun before, but from having watched a terrific amount of police procedurals on television, I have some sense of how the contraption works—in addition to all those years of other, as it’s turning out somewhat surprisingly useful, self-defense training exercises Dad put me through.

Like I’ve seen (fictional) cops and murderers do countless times, I cock the trigger—at least I think that’s what it’s called, what I do, when you jiggle the gun in various ways and prepare to shoot it. I could pull the trigger. I could kill P.F. right now. Kill Mrs. Severy. Pete’s mother. I could kill Pete’s mother. I could kill myself. I could cry for even having that thought.

“We have to
leave
, Zoey,” Pete says. He takes the gun from my hand. Keeps aiming it at P.F., then turning it toward his mother. “We’re leaving,” he says. His face looks strangely exhilarated, that lovely round face with a veneer of sweat on it, beneath that springy hair.

He puts on a pair of sunglasses pulled from his pocket, thick, plastic, ironic rich-kid ones, then nudges my brother. “Buddy, can you walk?” Ben doesn’t answer. “Buddy?”

“You’re going to have to carry him,” I say. Pete hands me back the gun. “You okay with this?” he asks me. I nod. But I’m not okay with this. Really, really not okay with this. What choice do I have, though? I keep the gun aimed at the adults in the room while Pete scoops up my lumpy brother, still catatonic, still bleeding. I see, as he’s lifting him, a tear
in his jacket toward the upper arm, blood emanating from that tear. I heave a sigh of relief.
It’s just the upper arm where Ben’s been shot
. These are the thoughts of my life, right at this moment, with my dad missing and Pete’s mom trying to … to what? I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

“Come on, Roscoe,” I say to the dog as we’re walking out of the room, my brother comatose, Pete having what seems an inappropriate smile on that lovely face, me carrying a gun.

Roscoe looks up at Mrs. Severy. He’s waiting for her permission to leave with me. Oh, god, this,
this
, is too much. I start to cry. “Come on, Roscoe,” I say again. Mrs. Severy doesn’t say a word.

“Adolfo, you’re a very good boy,” she says calmly.

I walk over to Adolfo. Roscoe. Mrs. Severy’s on the couch. I look her in the eye as I grab Roscoe’s collar and start to drag him.

“Please, Roscoe,” I say. I’m sobbing. “
Please
.”

I point the gun at the ceiling. Mrs. Severy reaches out and starts to take it from my hand. I pull the trigger. The trigger is looser, I guess is the word for it, than I’d have expected. It shoots easily. Smoothly. A bullet shoots up into the ceiling. I’m surprised how much kickback there is. So much I can feel it in my bicep. I flinch, but feel some power in me as well. I have agency. I have a
gun
.

“Come with me
now
, Roscoe,” I shout. I point the gun at Mrs. Severy now, again, looking her in the eye. Her eyes look so much like Pete’s. Those hazel eyes. I’d have thought she would have ice-blue eyes, but no, soft hazel, with some lines and wrinkles around them that make her seem even more elegant and powerful and some makeup stuck in those lines and wrinkles that undoes some of her elegance and power, but not by a lot.

I grab Roscoe’s collar again and drag, and drag, and finally he starts to walk, reluctantly; I don’t know what this woman has done to my dog, but he’s my dog, and goddamnit it, he’s coming with me. I think about pointing the gun at him to make him move faster, then I cry even harder when I realize I’m having this thought.

P.F. follows us to the front door. I’m dragging Roscoe with one hand, holding the gun in P.F.’s direction with the other hand, trying not to hook that loose trigger again, because I am scared and I am confused but I am not, no I am not, a nihilist. (It goes without saying that I know
this
because Dad sat me down, at age ten or eleven, over ice cream to tell me about the nihilists, who believe, in essence, that life is objectively pointless. “Libertarians don’t necessarily think that life is without objective truths or morals. Our point is that the government shouldn’t be telling people what to do except under a few extremely limited circumstances. And they certainly shouldn’t be able to take forty percent of my income to pay for wars we shouldn’t be involved with. Or public schools,” I recall him saying. “But if you decide later, when you’re older, that you are a nihilist, then that’s your choice.”)