Save the Enemy (26 page)

Pete stops in front of our house. Uncle Henry is sitting on the front stoop. He’s smoking a cigarette, which he stubs out on the step as soon as he sees us. “Sorry. A bad habit. Just an occasional cancer stick when I’m out of town.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask him, getting out of the car.

“Your aunt and I got worried when you left the way you did,” he says, eyeing my father, holding out his hand to shake my father’s hand. “Jacob,” he says, his voice lowering a register or two. “How’re things?”

“Not at the house, Henry,” dad says. “Never at the house. Julia’s allergic. You know that.”

“She’s dead,” Uncle Henry says.

“Yes, I’m aware,” my dad says. Then: “Still, not here.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Same as always,” says Uncle Henry. “Aunt Lisa is inside. We used the key that your mom gave us when we first helped you move in.”

“Great,” says my father. “Really, great. You all hungry? I’m starved.”

“I am not literally starved, but I am very hungry,” says my brother.

He goes inside the house. My father and Uncle Henry follow. I call Roscoe out of the car, say to Pete, “Want to stay for dinner? We can get takeout from Lee’s.”

“I do. I want to,” Pete says, touching my hand, then
touching my arm, then pulling away. “I’m going to find Ben’s notebook. Get it back for him.”

“Oh,” I say. “Are we still in danger, Pete?”

“Molly might be if I don’t find that notebook,” he says.

“Oh,” I say, startled. “I thought this was over.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” Pete says.

“Do you want me to come with you?” I ask.

He smiles. He kisses my forehead. “Of course I do, nervous girl,” he says.

“But I can’t,” I say.

“I’ll come back,” he says. “I’ll have your brother’s notebook. I’ll make sure your friend is safe. And isn’t taking too much Ritalin. I’ll come back. Please promise me that you believe that.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to let down my guard, trying to be vulnerable, which is harder and scarier than trying to be invulnerable, after all this. I don’t really know Pete.

He’s been holding Roscoe’s leash. He hands it to me. Bends down to pet my dog, then says, “You’re like a brother to me.” Roscoe licks Pete on his cheek. “Thanks, dog,” he says before standing up, kissing me on the cheek.

“Does that make us related?” I ask.

“Luckily not,” says Pete, who then gets a serious look on his face. “We have a lot more to do, Zoey,” he says, and I don’t know if he means a lot more to do vis-a-vis our parents or each other or what.

“See you soon, I hope,” I say.

“I promise,” he says.

I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him, one soft kiss on the lips that I swear to myself I will never lose the feeling of. I try to record it in my brain and on my skin, in that moment. Then Roscoe starts fidgeting, and a mosquito bites me on
the cheek, and I step back down onto my heels. The kiss is already just a memory, even while Pete is still standing in front of me.

When he drives away
, I turn to come inside. My aunt and uncle are sitting on the gold couch, eating pieces of what looks like pepperoni.

“Alpaca sausage,” says Aunt Lisa, holding out a piece for me. “S’good.”

“Thanks,” I say, handing it to Roscoe, who gobbles it down. I’m composing a list in my head of the normal-life things that need doing now that we are home: wash my school uniform, Ben’s school uniform; put my floral dress in the dry cleaning pile; get dog food; get human food; get cell phone turned back on; get bills paid. Prepare, mentally, for lacrosse practices and seeing Muffies and Annes with bright futures and bright presents before them. I wonder if Pete will be in school, and if he is, what we will be to each other.

I walk to the kitchen counter to examine the pile of mail splayed on the granite. Bills, bills, magazine offers. A slim envelope from Berkeley. I open it. “We regret to inform you …” I put the letter down. No California. No escape. Maybe I will go to the University of Rhode Island and become a marine biologist after all. I can keep an eye on Molly there, if she’s speaking with me.

That is if URI will even have me. If we’d even have the money to pay for it, without Dad’s job or Mom’s freelance income, or bribes having been paid. I wish I had money and could just drift off to Europe. I would like to see the Stonehenge of Sweden, I think. I will have to stop by Lee’s tomorrow to ask her if I can still come work for her. I hope I
am okay as a waitress. But will we even get to stay here? Will we have to move? Are we still in danger? If we are, then who is trying to hurt us?

Dad comes out of the bathroom wiping his hands on his pants. His eyes meet mine.

“Why?” I ask him.

He gives me a sad half-smile, opens his arms. I step in for a hug. Dad kisses the top of my head. He stopped being really affectionate when I was younger. Maybe I’m the one who stopped it. I’ve missed him.

“You smell like smoke,” he says.

“I know, I need to shower,” I say.

“You were brave,” he says. “You should be proud. You are strong. I knew you would be. Don’t let yourself get bored, baby girl. Don’t trap yourself too young, with babies and mortgages. Husbands.”

“But you think I should go to college so I can meet a husband,” I say. “I saw your email to your Individualists.”

“Well, okay. But I didn’t mean it like that,” he says. “I just … I don’t want you to be unfulfilled. Mundanity isn’t good for people like you. Or your mother. You understand, Zoey, your mother didn’t do what she did because she needed the money. Not at first. Okay? Do you understand?”

And suddenly I do understand. All my life, I thought I was like Dad. Weird, quiet, awkward, short, messy, disorganized, into peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and having a strong dislike for organized activities.

But maybe it’s not Dad who I’m like. Maybe it’s Mom. My insouciantly dressed, murdered mother who has left us like
this
. My interesting, slow-acting-poison specialist mother, who found our home life so wretched that she became a murderer just to be less bored. Who then got herself killed and
Dad kidnapped. And put me and Ben and Roscoe in danger. And left me to fix it.

But I did. I fixed it. I wish I could talk to my mom about fixing it. I wish I could talk to her about Pete. And about why she became a slow-acting poison specialist. I wonder if her ghost will visit me and explain. I hope it will. I’d like to know how all this happened. I’d like to know her. It seems unlikely. I haven’t dreamed of her much at all, and when I have, she and I haven’t been chatty.

And I still haven’t seen any solid evidence that would lead me to believe ghosts actually exist, besides, you know, my brother being visited by hers on a regular basis. But also, I might just be past being surprised by anything. Ben told me it was statistically impossible we’d find Roscoe again. And now look at us. Anything could happen next. I mean, it really could.

“You want takeout, sweetie?” Dad asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Pizza?” says Dad. I’d been hungry for Lee’s. But now pizza sounds fine. Pizza, shower, sleep. Then life, I guess. A life where I finish high school, get through a handful more lacrosse games without working up a sweat, maybe find out if Pete and I like each other when we aren’t on the hunt for our criminally inclined parents, and then, who knows.

But first this. “So, we found something last night,” says Aunt Lisa, putting down her bag of alpaca sausage on the table. Roscoe immediately hops over to sniff it. He’s licking his lips. “Don’t know if it’s important or not. Found it in an air duct. Noticed when we turned the heat on last night. It burned a little. Brr, it gets colder in Virginia than you’d think, and I’m a New England girl!”

“Where is it?” I ask.

“Right here,” she says, pulling a Ziploc out of her bag. I walk over to take it from her and instantly know what I’m looking at.

“Ben, come with me,” I say, going upstairs to my room.

“I’m reading,” he says.

“Come with me,” I say.

“You’re too bossy,” he says, but follows this time.

When we get to my room, I turn on the light that makes the sea creatures swim across my walls. Take off the crusty, worn army jacket. Put the gun in my bedside table, then open the bag, which is filled with shreds of paper, charred and browned in places, with bits of my mother’s handwriting on them. I forgot what terrible handwriting she had. She’d write notes and lists that only our family could read. Outsiders would look and say, “Julia, you should have been a doctor!” And she’d laugh, say, “I can’t stand blood.”

Thinking of her saying that brings quick tears to my eyes. Mom couldn’t stand blood, but she was a killer and I want desperately to know where she got the idea to do this, and if it was
hard
to kill people. If they knew that she was killing them. How much she got paid to do it. If she liked doing it. If she loved me, and Dad, and Ben. If she was like me when she was my age. If she sees herself in me.

I pull out one scrap, with initials K.L. and a bit of an address. Another piece has 45 Neptune Drive, and the date 4/13 on it, but I can’t make out the year.

“It’s the J-File, Benny,” I say, feeling agitated.

“It would appear to be,” Ben says. “Though I would have to examine more of the papers to be able to say for certain. These papers definitely appear to have similarities with my dream diary.”

“You’ve seen these before, right?” I ask. My voice gets
louder. “Mom never visited you in your dreams, right? You just made up this crazy story. I know you know how to lie now. Why would you have lied about
this
?” I have to take slow breaths, talk myself down. If I keep this up, Ben is going to have one of his class-A meltdowns. Or maybe I’m going to have one of Ben’s class-A meltdowns. Like the nuclear reactor I’m named after (though I believe I’ve had more actual meltdowns than it’s had; the name Zoe apparently was an acronym for “zero power,” which makes a girl feel good and all). And there’s a gun in my bedside table. (One with no bullets in it, I think, I think?)

But Ben stays calm. He’s really changed, this little brother. This maddening little brother, the Trask bound for goodness if not greatness.

“If Mom hadn’t visited me in my dreams, how would I have known that it wasn’t Dad’s fault?” he says. And maybe he’s right.

The J-File. I don’t know, obviously, how this turned up, torn, in the heating duct. Maybe Mom hid it there, having second thoughts about giving it to P.F. Maybe then she had second thoughts about the second thoughts and visited Ben in his dreams to complete what she started.

Or maybe Ben really had found it, and had some understanding of what he was looking at. He might have gotten upset, then destroyed it in one of his now-rare fits, and forgotten that part, holding on to the J-File part that he saw in that steel-trap brain. I don’t know. I do know that I’m hungry. And tired of wondering, all the time, who is lying. And just tired. I put the Ziploc in my dresser and try to give Ben a hug. He squirms away, which is an odd relief. Not everything has changed.

“Where’s your friend Pete
, honey?” Aunt Lisa asks when we come back downstairs.

“He had to go,” I say. “I think he’ll be back.”

“Good,” says Aunt Lisa. “He seems very nice.”

“Is he your boyfriend?” asks Uncle Henry. I shrug.

And here we all are, at home, waiting for our pizza. I pet Roscoe, toss his ball around, put off starting on laundry and homework. Ben sits on the floor reading a very thick book. Dad is in his ransacked office, ignoring the mess, catching up with the Internet. Uncle Henry and Aunt Lisa watch television, nibbling on the homemade sausage. Nothing’s changed; everything’s changed. I know these people as well as I know anything, and in some ways I know everything about them. I love them. They love me. I can predict what they’ll do in almost any situation. Almost.

What I don’t know yet is what I’ll do. When I was little, between lectures about Ayn Rand’s cats and the proper technique for executing a perfect kick and the reasons why bread crusts are disgusting, Dad would tell me that the most important thing is not to be tripped up by your own worst tendencies. To learn your own patterns, and learn how to defeat the bad ones. To stop yourself from making the mistakes that your body and your brain want you to make. To make sure you won’t be your own fatal enemy. That I won’t be
my
own fatal enemy.

Whenever I looked confused or annoyed at this sort of ranting—which was a lot—he’d repeat a quote from Abraham Lincoln, Dad’s favorite “dead white powermonger.” Maybe he figured Abraham Lincoln was someone a ten-year-old girl could relate to, or at least someone we’d both heard of outside our home, unlike Ayn Rand.

The quote: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

I would stare at him, bored and pissed off. He would then go on to describe in great detail his “quibbles” with Abraham Lincoln—namely, that our sixteenth president suspended
habeas corpus
and expanded the role of the federal government. (In the name of ending slavery. Yes, Dad
did
admit that ending slavery was a good thing to do.
“But at what cost?”
)