Save the Enemy (24 page)

Pete gets out, leaves the key in the ignition. Ben picks up his book and Roscoe’s leash, and gets out, too.

“Go stand over there,” I shout, pointing at a tree toward the road.

I get into the driver’s seat. Move the seat forward, then put on my seatbelt. No time to think about this being a bad idea, or a failing idea. I adjust the steering wheel slightly and hit the gas.

BAM. I hit the house at the door. BAM. I go through the door. (
Dayenu. Dayenu
, Dad!) BAM. The airbag goes off in my face, feeling like a punch, covering me in a white powder that sticks because I’m still so wet. I take a deep breath, try to open the door. I’m stuck, the door won’t open. I put the car in reverse, honk so that if Pete and Ben and Roscoe are
nearby they’ll get the hell away, look in the rearview mirror, then hit the gas again. Once I’m out a few feet, I stop the car, turn it off, get out, take one breath, shout “DON’T FOLLOW ME” to Pete, Ben, and Roscoe, then turn and run into the cabin.

I get inside and can smell the smoke everywhere. I look for Dad. Don’t see him. This is a small cabin. Just a one-room box here on the first floor, with those stone walls, thank God, thank God, thank you, God.

“Dad?” I shout. “Dad! Dad!”

I can smell the smoke. How is it not coming down the stairs? How has it been burning for all these minutes without the whole cabin going up in flames? I don’t know. Maybe it’s too wet to burn quickly. Maybe it hasn’t been going as long as it seems. This is just like that dream I sometimes have, only Mom isn’t chasing me this time.

Pete calls my name from the hole in the front of the cabin. “Are you okay?” he yells in.

“Keep Ben away!” I shout back at him. “Get Ben and get Roscoe and get away from here!”

I go into the kitchen area of the cabin. Just a sink and two burners, and a small fridge. Find two dish towels. Wet them in the sink. Hold one over my nose and mouth and run to the stairs. Please don’t let the stairs be on fire, I think. They aren’t,
Dayenu
.

“Dad! Dad!” I shout again.

I run up the stairs, not sure what I’ll find when I get there. Smoke. Lots of smoke. I get down on my hands and knees and crawl. It can’t be big up here. The first floor is so small. I crawl to the left. It’s hot. It’s hot up here. My eyes burn. Tears are streaming out of them. My palms are picking up splinters on this wooden floor, and they hurt, but I don’t stop. It’s
probably not smart to have a gun in a fire like this. Be fast, Zoey, I tell myself. Be fast. Be brave.

“Dad!” I shout when I enter the first room. I can’t see much. “Dad! Where are you, Dad?”

I don’t hear anything. I through as much of it as I can, but it’s too hot and too smoky. I’m crawling out, down a small hall, into another room. There are no carpets on the floor, bad for my knees, good for limiting flammability.
Dayenu, Dayenu
. I hear something in this room. A scraping of some sort.

“Dad!” I shout again. “Dad, are you in here?” I start to get up onto my feet, but it’s too smoky, and if I choke I won’t be any use here. Ben needs me to live through this. I need me to live through this. I’d like to see Pete again. And Roscoe. I’d like to save Dad. I’d really like to save my dad.

Crawling, I examine the corners of the room and see nothing. I don’t know where the fire is exactly; I know that it seems the amount of smoke around me is increasing. I hear the scraping again, crawl toward it. Not sure what I’m crawling toward.

In the middle of the room I feel a chair leg. I keep feeling. I feel a human leg. I peer at it as closely as I can. I think it’s Dad. I think it’s Dad! I shake the leg, tap it. “Dad, Dad,” I say. “Dad.”

The leg isn’t moving. It’s tied to the chair. I move in the direction of the head. Is Dad breathing? Is this Dad? I get to the head; it’s Dad. Oh, lord, it’s Dad. I put my hand on his chest to see if he’s taking in air, if I can feel a heartbeat. And yes, yes, yes, there is breath. There is life. I take the second dish towel and put it on his face. Realize I can’t see his hands.

Crawl around the other side of the chair. Arms tied. I try to untie the knots. They are tied too tight. Dad made me
practice tying and untying knots when I was young, but I’m not young anymore, and that was a long time ago. Try to put myself back into being six, eight, a good student, diligent. Work the knots. My hands still hurt from punching the window. The rope is burning them. The smoke is choking. Where are the flames? My eyes are stinging. Dad’s not moving, except for the tiniest bit of breath.

But I get the knots. I get them off his hands. I get them off his legs. I take his head and say, “Dad, we have to go. We have to get out of here.”

He looks up at me and I can see his eyes open for the first time. Dad is looking at me. He lifts his hand and brushes my face. He looks exhausted.

“Leave me here,” he whispers.

Dad won’t, or can’t, move. The dish towel is sliding off his face onto the floor. I put it back, hold it there.

“We have to go, Dad,” I say. “The house is on fire.”

“Zoey, you shouldn’t have come here,” he says.

“Dad, we can talk about this when we get outside,” I say. “We have to go.”

“No,” he says. I try to drag him, but I have to stand up to get any pull, at which point the smoke becomes too thick to breathe, even with the quickly drying cloth over my mouth and nose.

“Please, Dad,” I say. “Please. After everything you’ve put us through. You can’t do
this
to us now. Ben needs you. I need you. Roscoe.”

“You found Roscoe?” Dad says, lifting his head just a little.

“Yeah,” I say. “He’s outside. He’s waiting for you. So is Ben.”

“Ben,” Dad repeats. He lays his head back down and
begins to curl himself on the floor, like a dog fitting himself into a too-small dog bed. “No no no no,” Dad says. “No no no no. Zoey, go. Go.”

I slap him. “Get up,” I say. “Stop this.”

Dad stands up, seems immediately overcome by the smoke, or something, and falls back to the floor.

“Come on,” I say, tugging on his arm. “Daddy. We have to crawl.”

He gets on his knees. I lead him toward the doorway, checking every few inches to make sure he is still with me. He is. But when we get to the door, I see that there is now fire in the hall. My stupid hope that the cabin wasn’t actually on fire—that this was merely some sort of staging, designed to give us an appearance of danger without any real danger—is gone.

We crawl back into the room. I close the door behind us.

“Is there a window in here?” I ask.

“I think so,” Dad says.

“You
think
so?” I repeat. This is not how Dad taught eight-year-old me to survey a room, any room, from which one might need to execute an escape. “Follow me,” I order him as I crawl toward an outer wall, where I hope I will find an openable window. He follows, I see, as I turn back repeatedly to make sure he’s still there and that our room hasn’t yet been engulfed with flames.

I get to the wall. Feel my way up it and along it, looking for a way out. It’s hard to breathe, but I’m doing okay, I am, and I find a window and try to open it. It’s locked. Or stuck in some way that makes it hard to open. I feel around it until I come to what seems like an old-fashioned window lock, which is hot because, I guess, of the
fire
. Using the towel to touch it, I try to get it unclasped. It doesn’t work. It might be
that the lock is stuck, or that the window is painted shut, or not even designed to open.

“Shit,” I say. Then remember Dad. “Sorry,” I say, not even sure if he can hear me. There’s no time to find another way. I pull out the gun, hoping there’s a bullet left, and that it’s an effective bullet, and I shoot the window lock, with the same pain as always, then try the window again.
Dayenu
—it opens. It opens! I put the gun back in my pocket and look out the window. We’re on the side of the cabin facing the river. Looking up, I see fire. Looking down, pretty far down, I see rocks and mud, my shoes still where I left them, and no other options.

I pull my father up by his collar. Say to him, “Keep your feet down and roll forward when you hit the ground,” like he isn’t the one who taught
me
how to survive a long jump.

He hesitates at the window.

“Go,” I say to him, giving him a shove. He jumps. I get my head out the window just in time to see him land on his ass and scream in pain, then scoot off to the side. It’s my turn. My turn to try out my dad’s theory of survival: feet down, roll forward. I climb up into the window. Say a quick
“Dayenu”
to myself and jump.

It’s over in a
heartbeat. My body does the right thing, for once. My knees bend, followed by a little tumble forward through the mud, stopping right by my clogs. I put them on. Walk to Dad. He’s moaning in pain.

“I think I broke my tailbone,” he says. He sneezes. “And there’s a high pollen count today. This is awful for my allergies. I haven’t had my decongestants in a
week
.”

“Not now, Dad,” I say, trying to help this broken man stand. “Let’s get to Ben and Roscoe.” And Pete, I think. “He’s
a musician,” I tell Dad, without identifying who I am talking about. “He writes songs. He wrote a song about me.”

“You should have left me,” Dad says quietly, climbing onto his knees and leaning forward.

“Why?” I shout. “So you can make us orphans? And get off scot-goddamn-free with all the things in that
J-File
that we’ve been hearing so much about? The Jacob File of very terrible murders? Jacob’s list of assassinations?”

“It’s not a Jacob File,” Dad says, looking surprised. “Did somebody tell you that? Why do you think it’s a Jacob File?”

“Why do you think?” I shout, waving my arms around at EVERYTHING. I look at Dad again, exasperated, furious. And maybe it is just allergies, but I don’t think so; I think he’s weeping, his cheek on the muddy ground. He reaches out to grab my ankle and holds on. “Zoey, it’s not the Jacob File. It’s the Julia File.”

We sit in the
mud, and Dad, between sniffles and sneezes, tells me that it was Mom, not him, who worked for Mrs. Severy. That he’d spent my whole life trying to protect me from the consequences of her little freelance killing job.

“She specialized in slow-acting poisons,” he says. I really didn’t know Mom at all.

“Why didn’t you stop her?” I ask.

“I believe in private militias,” Dad says. He sits up. Winces. Sneezes. “We were so young when this started,” he says. “We just didn’t know what would happen. We didn’t know. And when your mother tried to get out …”

“I thought it’s the spouses who get killed,” I say, all world-weary and wise to the ways of freelance assassins. “Not the killers themselves.”

“Oh, Zoey,” Dad says. He looks more sad than I have ever
seen him. Sadder than when he learned John Galt had been given away. Sadder than at Mom’s funeral. “Your mother was trying to get out. P.F.—do you know P.F.?”

“More than one,” I say.

Dad nods. “The short one. He said he could help us. He told Mom to bring him the J-File. That he had friends in law enforcement who’d use it to stop Mrs. Severy. We didn’t know if we could trust him. But we also didn’t know what other choice we had. Then Mom …”

“Was killed,” I say.

Dad nods again. “But even before then. She, she couldn’t find the J-File the night she was going to bring it to P.F. She was going to tell him. To figure out another way to make Mrs. Severy stop. To make her pay. That’s what she told me her plan was. Then you’d go to college. Your mother and brother and I would go to California, too, maybe. For a fresh start.”

“Ben doesn’t like changes to his routine,” I say.

“Right, right,” Dad says. I don’t say anything to modify my earlier observation, even though, thinking about it, Ben has actually proven shockingly adaptable. My brother may be as much a mystery as my dead, killer mother.
Killer mother
. I’m appalled. I’m aghast. I’m shocked. And I wish she were here so I could ask her about it. How did she learn about slow-acting poisons? How many people did she kill? Was it hard to do? Did they know she was there to kill them? Were they bad people? Was she bad?

“But how did you get kidnapped?” I ask. “And why were your kidnappers asking
me
for the J-File?”

Dad’s quiet. “Dad?”

“I’m so embarrassed, Zoey,” he says. “I’ve made so many mistakes. When your mother was killed, I … I did my best. But I was a mess. An irrational mess.”

“How did
you
get kidnapped?” I ask again.

“I tried to blackmail Mrs. Severy,” Dad says. He’s shaking his head. “I told her that I was going to leak the J-File if she didn’t pay me one million. I thought a million dollars was reasonable. It would last us a long time, but it’s not so much that she couldn’t spare it. And she’d have to swear to me that she would never come near you and your brother.”

“But you didn’t have the J-File,” I say. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Dad says. “No, I do. I know what I was thinking. It made so much sense to me at the time. I thought if Mom didn’t have the J-File, that meant either it had truly gone missing or else Mrs. Severy’s
goons
had already gotten their hands on it somehow. Mrs. Severy wouldn’t know if the J-File really was missing. For all she’d know, I really had it. Either that, or she’d know I didn’t, and wouldn’t take my threat seriously. My thought was that either way there was unlikely to be a negative outcome if I embarked on this path.”

“I’d say you got that pretty wrong,” I say, extending my arms to highlight various truly terrible facets of our environment.

“It would seem so,” Dad says. He’s quiet, then says, “I’d take it all back if I could, Zoey. All of it. I can’t bear to think about … I kept trying to tell them that you didn’t have the J-File. To leave you alone. That you couldn’t do anything. That the file had just … disappeared altogether.”

“Oh,” I say. “You don’t know about Ben.”

“What about Ben?” Dad asks.

I don’t answer. Now might not be the time to bring up Mom’s ghost. Or Ben’s dream diary. “We should go get him and get out of here,” I say.