Save the Enemy (6 page)

Our furniture is not Old Town style—not that I’ve been inside so many Old Town houses, which I haven’t, because our neighbors are mostly kind of standoffish. But I can see in people’s first-floor windows. So I know they have a lot of carved wood and dusty-pink upholstery. Their paintings tend toward the dark portraits of severe-looking men in military costumes. Our furniture is eclectic. Mom took a lot of pleasure going to yard sales and antique shops, assembling an upscale-flea-market style for our living quarters. She called it “tiki chic,” and always made those annoying scare quotes when she said that, a couple of times a year, usually apropos of nothing.

With Mom gone, dead, the house looks more straight-up flea market. We might even have actual fleas. I’m not what you might call a neat freak, but compared with Dad or Ben I’m obsessive-compulsive about dust, clutter, mess, pillows askew on the yellow velvet couch, and the two velvet chairs which don’t match the one leather recliner that Dad insisted we get. (Mom objected on the grounds that those recliners “read lower class”; Dad called her a “pretentious twit” and kept the recliner.) Our lamps have burned-out bulbs. There are dead flies on the windowsills. Dog hair still creeps out from
underneath all the furniture, even though we haven’t had a dog here in months. I need to get on top of taking over the domestic arts in
chez nous
or else we’re going to become the sorts of people you see on TV, on the shows about people who really, really don’t have their shit together.

And, as I imagine Pete’s eyes moving from one object to another, my mind’s eye (it probably needs glasses) fixes on the big smear of dust across the shabby white wicker coffee table Mom thought was so “witty” when she brought it home from some trip she’d taken to Fort Lauderdale. I’ve been meaning to dust the table for weeks but haven’t felt up to it.

“I had a good time tonight,” Pete says before Ben and I get out of the car. He gets close to my face. His breath smells syrupy.

“Me, too,” I say. I immediately regret saying it.
A good time
?

But for all that, I’m extremely grateful that Pete and his brown Volvo were there with us. The night would have been worse without them. I’ve never contemplated syrupy breath before.

Pete looks at me, with these big brown eyes and thick eyebrows. He’s got on some battered flannel shirt and attractive jeans. I can’t tell if his hair is due for a cut or if he’s had it cut to appear to be overdue for a cut. Either way, it’s appealing. Me, I’m just a nervous girl with bad bangs, bad clothes, a missing father, a highly developed anxious instinct, and a stolen gun in her tote bag.

“Are you dating my sister?” Ben asks.

Right, all that and a brother.

“It’s time for bed,” I say to Ben. “Say goodnight to Pete.”

“I’m not five,” Ben says, getting out of the car.

“Don’t forget to brush your teeth,” I call after him. This is theatrical and bossy for no good reason. Ben doesn’t have a key and can’t get into the house without me.

And indeed, Ben is standing at the front door waiting for me, like Roscoe used to do. “I don’t want to brush my teeth,” he shouts. I don’t want Ben throwing a temper tantrum now. He does that occasionally. It usually happens when his schedule has been disrupted, he hasn’t had enough sleep, and he’s had a lot of sugar. I can’t imagine that an encounter with a diabolical, armed lobbyist helped. So, this really would be the time.

I shrug toward Pete. “He doesn’t want to brush his teeth,” I say.

“You don’t have a nanny who makes him?” Pete asks.

I can’t tell if he’s joking to lighten the mood. “Just me.”

Pete leans in toward me. I want to explain about my dad being missing and thank him for not asking why we had to go to the Postal Museum in the middle of the night. I want to kiss him. I want to cry. I also want to go examine the gun—I’ve never had one in my hands before; Dad’s special self-reliance training didn’t extend to firearms. He’s afraid of them. Seems reasonable, I guess, unless you believe that might makes right or that the Second Amendment is worth preserving. Or that you might actually need to defend yourself one day.

Pete reaches out, touches my left hand. I realize my hands are clenched in fists again. Or maybe still.

He rubs my hand and says, “Goodnight, Zoey.”

I get out of the car and go inside. Ben goes up to his room without brushing his teeth.

In my own room, I want to examine the gun, but it scares me too much. What if I accidentally shoot it? What if I accidentally do it on purpose?

So I don’t even take it out of the tote bag—just remove my book, keys, wallet, and lip gloss, then put the bag-wrapped gun in my newsstand. I turn on this stupid, cheesy little lamp
my mom and dad gave me for my twelfth birthday, that’s next to my bed. It’s one of those “motion lamps” where the heat of the light makes a paper cylinder spin. My cylinder has pictures of fish and dolphins on it. The fish and dolphins look like they are swimming. I wanted to be a marine biologist back then, which made my dad happy because—stay with me—we lived in Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island has a good marine biology program, which meant I could be educated for in-state tuition.

Dad also thinks that education shouldn’t be publicly financed, so he is opposed to state universities on principle, but he’s not going to turn away a good bargain. Mom thought marine biology wasn’t a good profession for me. It would mean too much time in boats, which would make having a family hard. I wasn’t thinking about having a family. I wasn’t concerned about my education. I just liked dolphins. They are ancient descendants of land-walking mammals, you know. I like that animals can evolve back into the ocean. And that dolphins are remarkably, stunningly good at recovering from injuries. They can be bitten by a shark and survive. I like that, too. And their permanent smiles. Are they as happy as they look? They must be happy to be able to survive shark bites so readily.

I watch the swimmy creatures move around my room for a few minutes, saying “Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Dad” quietly. Then I look at the tote bag with its gun snuggled inside. And in case there’s more from Dad or his abductors, I look at my cell phone. But nothing, goddamn nothing. I look at the photo of the cigarette in the toilet. Then flip through some that are less alarming. When I get back to one of Mom wearing a holiday-themed sweater at Christmas—we had no tree, since “Jews don’t decorate shrubbery, but Catholics like
themed knitwear” (Dad’s words)—I turn the phone off. It’s time for sleep.

I wake up in
the morning to find Ben standing over me, staring.

“Pete made breakfast,” he says to me, as I try to control my startle.

“Pete?”

“He’s downstairs.”

“Why?” I ask.

“He’s making breakfast,” Ben repeats. I’m not going to get satisfactory answers here.

“Did you … sleep well?” I ask him as I start getting out of bed. The lamp is still spinning around. I turn it off, and the fishes and dolphins disappear. They’ve died is one way to look at it. They are just lights on the wall that have been turned off is another.

“Yes,” he says.

“Did you … see Mom?”

“She told me some more information,” he says.

“Did she say if Dad is okay?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think she’s omniscient. She might not
know
how Dad is.”

Ben leaves my room. I check my phone—still nothing—then pad downstairs, groggy, already in a somewhat anxious state. I don’t know what time it is. I have a vague recollection of some exciting, thrilling, terrible events from the evening before. I have a vague recollection that
school
is where I’m supposed to be going.

Pete has scrambled eggs and toast.

“Coffee?” I ask him.

“Just tea,” he says, pouring a cup from a pot.

“Nietzsche would like that,” I say to him. Yes, Zoey at—I
check the clock on the microwave—6:45 in the morning is full of random allusions to the German philosophers. “No meals between meals, no coffee, coffee breeds darkness,” I mumble. “
Tea
is wholesome only in the morning. A little, but strong. It’s from
Ecce Homo
. My dad read it to me when I was a kid. But I still like coffee …”

Pete turns back to the food. “You can have a lot of tea if you want. It’s pretty strong.”

“Thanks,” I say. This boy is so chipper so early in the morning. It is a relief to see my brother eating eggs, not ice cream. “So … what are you doing here?” I ask.

“Cooking breakfast,” he says.

“Why are you here cooking breakfast?”

“I slept in the car last night. We got done in DC after curfew,” he says. “Figured I’d stay outside your house, make sure you and Benster are okay, with your father out of town and no nanny.”

Jesus. This guy is looking out for me and Ben. He slept in the car and is here making breakfast. I can feel a tiny drop in my anxiety. For a moment, my heart rate seems very nearly normal. My head isn’t completely buzzy. Adrenaline isn’t giving me the sensation of EVERYTHING BEING AWFUL AND SCARY AND UNMANAGEABLE AND COMPLETELY UNFATHOMABLE. Do all rich kids stand guard outside some girl’s house all night when the father isn’t home, only to swoop in and man the griddle first thing in the morning?

“Do you find yourself sleeping in your car outside your classmates’ houses a lot?” I ask him. “Is this something normal for your cohort?”

“Heh,” Pete says. “I don’t know about my ‘cohort’ but I’ve slept in my car a few times. When I go play gigs, sometimes I’ll sleep in the car if I’m missing curfew. Or when I stay
at my mom’s house, if she
happens
to be in the country, I’ll sometimes sleep in the car rather than coming in and having to deal with her. Moms can be really crazy.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say. But then I get sad. My mom was crazy, but now I really miss her. I didn’t have my own car or maybe I’d have slept outside rather than deal with her, too. We won’t get to see. “What about your dad?” I ask.

“He died when I was little,” Pete says. “He drowned.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” I say.

“Thanks,” Pete says.

Pete serves me up one last piece of buttered toast, drinks another swig of tea, then says he has to get going to school soon, so he can change clothes before classes. He asks if we want to ride in with him.

“Sure,” I say. “We’ll just go get dressed.”

By 7:30 we are out the door, back in the Volvo, on our way to school, where I quickly realize that my homework is not done, my reading isn’t completed, and—since I seem unable to read people’s minds, despite reading several books on the topic—I am not going to pass the pop quiz in chemistry. My dream of going to Berkeley—it’s always been a long shot, given my wildly erratic transcript, but I have good SATs and my
mother is dead
, which should count for something—seems ever-farther away. As far away as California.

I run into Pete
in the hall between miserable, unfathomable chemistry and English, which I am pretty good at, though distracted by trying to employ psychic phenomenon. He smiles. “Hey,” he says. “How are you feeling today?”

How honest an answer should I give?

“Thanks for driving us,” I say. “Thanks for cooking breakfast.”

“No problem,” he says. He pauses. “There’s a party tonight. Want to come with?”

Oh boy. My pulse quickens. Little Zoey, getting asked on a date. Little Zoey, who can’t leave little Ben by himself, lest he turn on the stove and forget to turn it off.

“Can my brother come?” I ask.

“Ben? Sure, of course,” Pete says. “Ben’s the best.”

A voice inside of me says, “This is not the time to develop a frivolous social life. Now is the time to find Dad.” Another, louder, less sophisticated voice inside of me says, “Squee! Pete wants to take me to a party!”

Ben is waiting for
me by the field house after lacrosse practice. I notice that instead of his uniform, Ben is wearing suspenders with a pair of Dad’s pants and what may be one of Mom’s T-shirts. His shoes don’t match, but at least he is wearing two of them. How did I miss this outfit when we were going to school today? Did Pete notice it?

“Want to go to a party tonight?” I ask him as we start walking toward home.

“Not really,” he says. “Not at all.” Then he starts to breathe quickly. “Please don’t make me go to a party. We need to go find Dad.”

“How about we go to the party for fifteen minutes, then go to P.F. Greenawalt’s house?”

“Okay,” Ben says.

I’ll find a way to make this work.

Pete comes to pick
us up at 8:30. I’ve agonized over what to wear—what indeed is the appropriate outfit for an evening that includes romance, socializing with wealthy classmates, and then hunting for one’s mysteriously kidnapped father? I
have no idea. In Rhode Island, I’d have worn tight jeans, old clogs, and an acrylic sweater. Then I would have regretted what I was wearing when I saw what the other kids were wearing. But mostly those are just the sorts of things I owned. Mom had great clothes; I have acrylic sweaters and spritzed bangs.

For all I know, kids wear, like, suits to private school parties. Or floral dresses. A lot of girls wear exceedingly prim floral dresses on our few “dress-up days” at school. I finally put on a floral dress that I found at an Old Town consignment shop with tights and my clogs. This is what I now usually wear to dress-up day. It is a soft teal with lilac flowers on it, and it’s made of a very fine corduroy.

I used to wear a different outfit to dress-up day—a navy blue skirt with a nice orange T-shirt—but then one day that kid Brian Keegan asked me why I always wore the same outfit and why it didn’t look like what the other girls wore. He didn’t ask it meanly. He seemed genuinely curious. I don’t know how or why he noticed my attire, but I went out after that and hunted down a floral dress I wore to three subsequent dress-up days. It is an alarmingly repellent dress, according to some people—Mom, who was raised semi-Catholic, told me that only backwards Protestants wear dresses like that—but I hope I will fit in.

I’ve asked my brother to change his clothes, but he refuses. He says he won’t leave the house at all if I keep talking about clothes.