Save the Enemy (3 page)

“So what about dinner?” was my response.

As I climb into Pete’s brown Volvo, he gives me a once-over. “What position are you?”

I don’t have an answer to this question. I’m not sure what he’s asking. “Democrat?” I offer. “But with a libertarian twist. Small ‘l’ libertarian. Mostly, though, I like to think more abstractly, like, outside the two-party political system.”

He smiles. “I meant lacrosse. You’re actually on the team?”

“Oh!” My face gets hot and I stare out the window. “I
guess so. Technically. They won’t let me quit.” There’s a lot of traffic, but I enjoy looking at the big houses. I don’t mind sitting for a bit. “Are you nervous about your gig?” I ask, mostly to fill the silence at a red light. “Does it bother you playing at a place named for a hero of the Confederacy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Playing at a place named for Robert E. Lee?”

He starts laughing. “The owner’s name is Lee. She’s from Guam. Seriously, come check out the gig. I’m playing some new songs.”

My face starts to burn again. No way will I look at him. After an eternity of start-and-stopping through Old Town, Pete finally reaches our townhouse. My brother is sitting out front.

“Nice place,” Pete says.

“Thanks,” I say with a mumble. His parents probably live in a castle or something. I slam the passenger door and hurry up the walk, fumbling with my keys. Pete stays there in his car, waiting for me to get safely inside, I guess. No doubt he knows about my Mom’s murder and my Tragic Figure status, like everyone else. Ben asks in a really loud, matter-of-fact voice, “Is that your boyfriend?” I can only imagine how red my face is as Pete honks and zooms off to his gig at Not-Confederate Lee’s. I push the door open, then turn and wave goodbye like a spaz.

The lights inside are off.

“Dad? Dad?” I call. I walk to the kitchen. No Dad. I walk to his computer room. No Dad. I go upstairs. He’s not in his bedroom. When I come back down, Ben is in the kitchen, scribbling in one of his notebooks.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“He was supposed to pick you up,” Ben says.

I frown. Once more, I try calling Dad’s cell phone, but there’s still no answer. “Were you outside for long?” I ask Ben as I hang up.

“I don’t process time very well without benchmarks. I’ve told you that.”

Fair enough
, I think. I guess I should make us dinner. I know
I’m
starving, at least. Usually Dad has whipped something together or ordered takeout in advance of picking me up. I’m hoping Ben says peanut butter and jelly since it’s all I really know how to make. We had a really old gas stove in Rhode Island. That’s another reason the kitchen was my Mom’s private place: whenever she was going to cook dinner, she’d make me leave in case the stove blew up. My best friend in Rhode Island once asked me how my mom thought it was possible that the stove might blow up, and yet Mom never bought a new one. I still have no answer. I asked my dad about it once, but he denied that Mom ever claimed such a thing, or if she did she was just pissed off. I point to my lack of cooking skills as evidence.

Ben is okay with PB&J. I think about slipping some kale into the sandwich, but I think we’re out. I’m supposed to mind his veggie intake; there are a lot of things I’m supposed to do. I go into the bathroom to wash my hands before I fix our food. Then I notice something.

There’s a cigarette butt in the toilet.

Dad doesn’t smoke. Neither do I. I’m pretty sure my fourteen-year-old, autistic-spectrum brother isn’t smoking. Mom always said Ben wouldn’t smoke because he wouldn’t betray her in that way. Dad said he wouldn’t because the science literature shows a low incidence of smoking among the Neurodiverse. So I’m staring into the toilet trying to figure out how freaked out
I
should be. Is it possible that a Con Ed man
or solicitor was in the house during the day? Smoking? Not likely. Is it possible Dad is dating a woman who comes over when Ben and I are at school, and she drops cigarettes in the toilet? Even less likely. According to Dad, Ayn Rand says that cigarettes are a wonderful human achievement, and we should celebrate them as an important work product. But he also says he can’t participate in this facet of human achievement because of Mom’s allergies. And he’s even used that line since Mom died, so I don’t think he’d date a smoker, even if he were capable of dating anyone but Ayn Rand now that Mom is gone. Plus, Ayn Rand is gone, too.

I call Ben in. “Can you look in there and tell me what you see?” I point at the toilet.

He peers into the bowl. “Urine,” he says. “No feces.”

“Do you see the cigarette butt?” I ask.

Ben peers into the bowl again. He says he sees it; it’s floated under the rim where it’s not so obvious, but he can see a bit of it. I ask him if he can conceive of any possible scenario in which there would be a cigarette butt in the toilet of the house. He tells me that he is not imaginative in that way. There’s a lot of this kind of back-and-forth, and just when I am about to scream, he tilts his head.

“I have a solution. You come up with possibilities and ask me about them one by one.”

There is no humor in his voice. If he were a friend, like I thought Abby would be (or maybe Brian Keegan could be, or better yet, Pete could be, and maybe more?) we’d probably be laughing to hide our anxiety. But this is Ben. Smiles and laughs are rare, and when they do come, the contexts can be baffling.

“Girlfriend who smokes. Worker in the house during the day. Our pipes are somehow connected with a neighbor’s ashtray …”

Ben rejects the various scenarios. I take a photo of the toilet with my cell phone, then flush, wash my hands again, and go back into the kitchen where I try Dad’s cell again. Nothing. Ben and I eat our kale-free sandwiches. I try to do some homework. We watch a little television. No Dad. All I can think about is Mom and how much she hated smokers. Not smoking.
Smokers
. Her parents smoked. Her father died of lung cancer in his fifties. Her mother died not long after that, while riding a motorcycle on a two-lane highway in rural Massachusetts. She’d taken up bikes as a hobby after her husband died. Mom blamed both their deaths on cigarettes.

By ten o’clock I can’t sit still. I used to call the police on my parents when I was a kid if they were out too late—which they were quite often, which only made me more anxious. Mom once said I should try St. John’s Wort. Then she was randomly murdered. There is no root that cures justifiable paranoia. For all I know, Dad is at the library (which closes at ten), or attending a meeting of Libertarians Anonymous, or doing any number of the Dad-like things he does when he bothers leaving the house.

“Should we call the police?” I ask Ben.

“Dad thinks that the police are an unwelcome use of tax dollars,” Ben says.

“Brush your teeth. Go to bed.”

Ben brushes his teeth. He refuses to floss. He will need a lot of dental work one day. I go into his room, decorated in
Star Wars
paraphernalia that Dad bought on eBay after Mom died, and pat his head. He flinches. I shove my hand in my pocket.

“I still keep dreaming about Mom,” Ben says.

“It must be nice to see her every night,” I say to him.

“She’s telling me that it isn’t Dad’s fault she got killed,” Ben says.

“Did we ever think it was?”

“I haven’t come to a determination,” he says. “I’m going to sleep now.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, trembling. “Say hi to Mom for me if you see her,” I say, quietly, so Ben won’t really hear. Then, louder, while turning out the light on the way out: “See if you can find out where Dad is.”

The next morning I oversleep. I know even before I get up that my dad isn’t home. He’s the one who nags me out of bed in the morning.

I scramble out from under the covers, heart pounding, and check on my brother. His room is empty. He’s been an early riser all his life, like Mom always was. Dad claims he was once like me, prone to laziness. It’s through sheer act of will that he became a Responsible Adult. Or so he likes to remind me over and over. He also claims that he doesn’t tell me these things to be annoying or preachy. I think he wants to let me know what’s in store for me when I grow up. If I grow up.

I race downstairs. My brother is sitting in the kitchen, reading
The Wall Street Journal
on his iPad and jotting things in a notebook.

“Did you eat?” I ask.

“I had some ice cream,” Ben says.

“ ‘The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast,’ ” I quote from a movie, but Ben doesn’t get the reference or the
humor and my memory is so god-awful I can’t remember which movie I’m quoting. I’m more certain about breakfast: cereal and coffee. Mom and Dad let me start drinking coffee young. It stuck. We learned I have an addictive personality. Self-awareness and honest insight about oneself are other important keys to survival, as I’ve also learned from You-know-who.

“Ice cream contains vital calories, sugars, and nutrients,” Ben says.

“Dad’s not home,” I say. It’s not a question.

That still does not mean that there is a crisis on our hands. This is Dad. One time, a few years before Mom was killed, he vanished for two days. Just took off to go hike some old train line that got turned into a walking trail. He wanted to see it because, he said, it had been transformed using only private funds, no government money, and also it was supposed to be very pretty. Pretty, but not well-marked; he apparently got lost, and then, once he realized where he was, discovered it was only one more day’s hike to the execution spot of a famous abolitionist. So he stopped at a little store to buy water and food and kept walking, spending a tentless couple of nights at campgrounds along the way. Mom got a call at the end of it, asking for a ride back to his car.

When I asked him what he could have possibly been thinking with such an idiotic move, he said he was sorry; he hadn’t realized he was going to be out so long. Then he said sometimes a person’s best ideas come to him (or her) in a flash. And then he said, “All good ideas come while walking. Nietzsche said that.” Then he said that the goal in life is to develop the wisdom to know which of these ideas to pursue, and then to muster the resources to pursue them.
“Self-awareness and honest insight”—I think that came from the same speech, now that I remember.

I would like both of the above right now to know if I need to be panicking. Or calling the police. I really have no idea.

On top of that, I keep having this terrible feeling that if I call the police, the police will realize that a seventeen-year-old girl and her overly literal fourteen-year-old brother are living unsupervised, and will dispatch us somewhere. Possibly somewhere unpleasant. I guess conceivably we could stay with my Mom’s brother, Uncle Henry, and his wife, on their remote Rhode Island alpaca farm, if they would have us. Or with Molly, my former best friend, who has not spoken to me since Mom was killed, if she’s finally forgiven me for sleeping with her boyfriend. (The boyfriend she’d broken up with when it happened, in my defense.) These are possibilities, maybe? None ideal. None even really possible. We have school. We can’t just go and
leave Dad
. What if Roscoe comes home?

“We should go to school,” I say to Ben.

He looks up from his ice cream and
The Wall Street Journal
. “Okay,” he says.

“Or maybe we’ll skip school today. Go look for Dad and the doggie.”

“Okay,” he repeats. Same tone, same everything. I appreciate his unexpected flexibilty in our schedule.

“No, school is better.” I run upstairs, shower, put on my school uniform. I then remember that we have an away game today. I strip off my uniform and fling it on the floor and wriggle into my lacrosse clothes.

In a daze, I’m aware of Ben and me as we enter the world: heading over to King Street to take the trolley up the hill, and then catching another bus over to Shenandoah. It’s nearly
noon by the time we get there. I want to be talking to Ben about Dad—
that we haven’t seen him in over 24 hours
—but I don’t want to worry him if I don’t have to. Plus, he’s my little brother. I need to protect the little freak as best I can. Okay, “freak” is harsh. But love and anger are all tied up together: another valuable lesson I learned from Dad, apropos of god-knows-what.

“Bye,” I say to Ben.

“Bye,” he repeats. He turns and marches off to the middle school. I’m impressed by how calm he is. My knees are actually trembling. I head over to the upper school and into the lunchroom. Just as I walk in, with movie-set timing, the girls from the lacrosse team are finishing leading the other students in a big cheer: “Gooooo Librarians!”

Librarians. That’s right. That’s our team. No wonder Dad chose Shenandoah for me.

On the bus to
the game, and on the bench at the game itself, I have some good thinking time. Nobody asks why I was three hours late for school; I am the Tragic Figure. For once, I am relieved that I own this identity. I come up with what might be the best plan for dealing with this Missing-Dad problem: if he is not there when Ben and I get home, I will call Uncle Henry and ask him what to do. He is next in line as an authority figure in my life, after Dad, which is not ideal—but his wife, Aunt Lisa, is very smart and would probably know the right thing to do. I’m worried they think we should be homeschooled, though. Uncle Henry, born and raised a Jew, got wicked into Jesus at some point along the way. And the alpaca farm isn’t close to any public schools, I’m pretty sure.

Shenandoah wins the game. I don’t know the score.
Good for them! I mean us! The Librarians!

I picture the scene on the bus ride back to school: Dad is there in the parking lot, waiting for me. Roscoe is in the car with him. Dad explains that he spent the night tracking down our long-lost dog, and he is so sorry.

That’s not what happens.

I hurry into the locker room and don’t bother showering. I haven’t even gotten a little bit dirty, though I am sweating because it’s getting warm out, and I’m nervous as hell. I grab my books from my locker, mumble goodbye to my teammates and walk home. The whole way I try Dad’s cell phone, over and over. My back aches from carrying my heavy books; my brain and my chest hurt from being too scared. I grip my cell phone tightly, willing it to ring or vibrate. As with the (un)levitating chair, my mental exertions, strenuous and powerful as they feel, result in fucking nothing.