Save the Enemy (4 page)

As I pass Lee’s, I see Pete standing in the window, playing his guitar, just sort of warming up or something. He sees me and nods his head, like “C’mon in.” I shrug my shoulders in a way that he couldn’t possibly understand. I try to communicate, in short:
I’d love to come in because you’re very cute but my dad is missing and I’m really scared and are you sure this place isn’t named after a pro-slavery guy and call me later and I hope my dad is at home now
.

Ben is waiting outside, same as yesterday.

I forgot to tell him I’d be late because of lacrosse. I’ve got my answer about Dad, though. Ben shoves his notebook into his messenger bag and we head inside together. I would love to hug him right now. But I don’t. I can’t. Who knows what he’d do? I just say to him, “I’m going to call the police.”

He nods.

I open my mouth again, but my phone vibrates—a text.

“It’s from Dad’s phone!” I whisper. There is a flash of
crazed relief; Dad is probably texting to say he has bought a horse farm for us in Montana, where we’re going to live until I leave for college (assuming I leave for college). Or that he was put in jail over an existential taxpayer matter last night, but it’s been cleared up and he’ll be home soon.

The text reads:

RETURN J-FILE AND YOUR FATHER WILL BE RELEASED. DO NOT INVOLVE THE AUTHORITIES. LEAVE AT PM COLUMBUS AT MIDNIGHT. WE ARE WATCHING.

I reread the text. I have no idea what it means. J-File? PM Columbus? What are these things? WTF? How am I going to get anywhere at midnight and then back home again when the subway around here shuts down at midnight? Should I really not call the police?

Google says that a “j-file” is either a kind of computer file or else a band from Japan. (I accidentally hear one of their songs. Catchy.) Neither lets me know what I have to bring to the meeting at PM Columbus, whatever that is. I’m trying to imagine the “we” watching this scene. I imagine a lot of shaking heads, maybe even a slapped forehead. It feels hopeless.

I can’t even fathom, even a little bit, that my parents have ever been in possession of something so significant that Dad would get kidnapped over it.
Jesus
. Did Dad stumble onto something while working as an auditor? Is that why he quit his job—not just to spend time with his motherless kids? This theory doesn’t make a huge amount of sense—why wouldn’t
I have been kidnapped then, or Ben, so that Dad, the only person in this family who presumably knows what the J-File is, could have gotten it to the proper authorities, or kidnappers, or whomever?

But what do I know—maybe the kidnappers think Dad wouldn’t give up this precious file for kids. Maybe he’d have thought that the homespun self-defense training he gave me, or Ben’s magnificent brain, would have gotten us out without him having to turn over the file. Maybe the kidnappers understood the lay of the land. How should I know? What should I know?

“Ben?” I say. “I’m going to ask you something now.”

He’s quiet. “Okay, Ben?”

“I’m waiting for you to ask me,” he says.

“Do you have any idea what a J-File is? Or a PM Columbus?”

“I don’t know what they are,” he says. But something about his expression makes me ask him another question.

“Have you ever heard of them?”

“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t go on.

“AND?”

“Mom told me the J-File has been destroyed,” he says. Again, that’s it.

“That’s it?” I shout. “When did Mom say this? What was she talking about?”

“Mom comes to me in my dreams and tells me things,” he says.

“Ben, work with me,” I respond.

“On what?” he says.

“BEN! What is Mom telling you?” This conversation is insane.

“I’ve written it down,” he says. He gets the black and
white, cardboard-covered notebook out of his bag and opens it, flipping through pages. One page after another is covered in his chicken-scratch handwriting. His handwriting looks so much like Dad’s. Initials. Addresses. Dates. Ben points me to one; if I squint, like I’m looking at one of those 3-D posters, I can sort of make it out: M.R., 467 Pennyfield Road, San Francisco, CA, 2/14/1999.

“Mom and Dad were in San Francisco then, for their anniversary,” he says, his index finger touching the letters and numbers. “They left us with Uncle Henry.”

“What is this?” I ask him. “How do you fricking remember this stuff?” I don’t ask. I know the answer. It’s because his brain is like a sponge for information. If only he could remember to look both ways while crossing the street!

“My dream diary,” he says to me. “I told you I dream about Mom.”

“That she’s telling you to forgive Dad.”

“Other things, too. She tells me to write down the information. I don’t know what it means, but I’ve been doing it. It’s important.”

My little brother. From the outside, he appears normal. He is a little on the hefty side, like Dad, with Mom’s attractive olive skin. (I got Dad’s pink skin; luckily, even though I didn’t get Mom’s height, I did inherit her not-super-hefty build.) Mom used to dress him in strangely overly-formal clothes—clothes that were a little too perfect for an adolescent boy and that were made even a little odder because he’d spill food on the perfect clothes every day, and made a little odder still because
she
did not dress formally, and where did she get this idea that little boys need briefcases? Ben mostly shares T-shirts with Dad now. Those come pre-stained.

“I don’t understand, Ben,” I say. “Mom tells you things
like ‘J-File’ in your dreams?” I make the quote-unquote signs with my fingers. “She’s giving you initials and addresses to write down? When? Every night? Does she tell you why you have to write it down? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Not every night,” Ben says. “A couple of times a week. Not usually on the weekends. She might take Shabbat off? I don’t know why I have to write it down. But Mom asked me to do it. So I do. She told me not to tell you. She said it was dangerous.”

He wheezes a little as he says it. My hefty brother, in his T-shirt with Dad’s coffee stains on it, has never breathed very well. His thick, dark hair needs to be cut. His eyes always look sure and certain. He never says things he’s not one hundred percent about. He always looks like he has authority, even with that hair and that shirt.

And what I feel, in response to this news and this certainty, is an unspeakably degrading sensation: jealousy. That even after she died, my mother is favoring Ben. Sharing her life—no, her death—with him. But this is not the time for such feelings. I don’t actually believe in ghosts, for one thing. For another, maybe my brother has some useful insights.

“Ben, did she tell you what these things are? What they mean? What is a J-File?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Did she tell you anything about it?”

“Just that it’s gone,” he says. “Destroyed.”

“Oh shit,” I say. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I look at my brother. “Sorry.” After another second I ask him how he knows that this J-File thingie-whatsit has been destroyed.

“Mom told me,” he explains again. “In my dreams.”

Holy moly, this is ridiculous and amazing and terrible and scary and everything all at once. What is this J-File and how
does Mom even know what it is? And how is Mom talking to Ben in his dreams? And how come she never visits me?

“What about PM Columbus?” I ask.

“Mom took me there once,” he says.

“In your dreams?

“No,” he says, like I’m a moron. “She took me there one day when I didn’t go to school. PM stands for Postal Museum. On Columbus, near Union Station.”

Mom used to do that sometimes. When it was time to walk out the door in the morning, she’d ask if we’d rather go to school or go have an adventure. It was rare. At least with me. I think she may have done it more with Ben. Usually she was very concerned that we go to school and do well in school and make friends who would help advance our careers, when the time came.

Now Ben begins telling me facts about the Postal Museum.

“It has the largest stamp collection in the world. I know that from when Mom and I went there. And it’s where Dad goes to make drop-offs and pickups. That part Mom told me in a dream.”

I shiver, not knowing why. “What is Dad dropping off and picking up?”

“I don’t know,” Ben says. “Mom never said. She just said that none of this is Dad’s fault and he is doing his best. He wants to help.”

“Help what?” I say.

“Mom never said,” says Ben.

I spend I’m-not-sure-how-long reading Ben’s notebook. If I squint a little, I can sort of figure out what’s written there, and it’s mysterious. Initials, dates, addresses (some complete, with street names and numbers, city names; others are just city names or even just the name of what I’d guess is just a
building). Nothing else. There are about twenty or so listings, one per page.

Are they notes for some kind of screenplay or something Mom was working on? She used to say sometimes that she had the “soul of an artist but not the talent.” She said in a better world she “would have been a rock and roll star or a movie director.” I ignored her when she said this. I found it embarrassing. She had a terrible singing voice but would inflict that voice on us all the time, when she was cooking, or driving, or doing anything. Sometimes we’d meet someone out on the street and Mom would say they were “just like a character in a book.” I guess it’s not impossible that she was involved in some creative endeavor. I never saw any evidence of it. But maybe I just wasn’t looking?

“What are these?” I ask Ben.

“They’re what Mom tells me to write down,” he says. He stares at me as if I’ve recently been lobotomized. “I told you that.”

“You don’t have any
context
for the information?” I ask.

He takes the notebook from me. He licks his finger before turning each page. Which is gross. He points his licked finger at one of the entries.

“R.S.,” he says. “In Charleston, South Carolina. As I recall, the dates match up when our family took our Christmas trip to Charleston. An Australian businessman named Rob Smallneck died while we were visiting. On the Saturday. I believe he was found naked in the kitchen of an upscale barbeque restaurant under what the newspaper described as ‘mysterious circumstances.’ ”

I shiver again. “That’s weird,” I say, rather obviously. I sometimes wish I could have Ben’s brain for a day or two, instead of my brain, which works like this: I remember we
took a horse-drawn carriage tour through the city and my father got into a fight with the carriage driver about whether the Civil War was really about states’ rights or slavery. I couldn’t even tell you what year that was, though, let alone specific dates, let alone specific details about Bob Smallneck turning up naked and dead in a fancy barbeque joint.

I do remember that Dad wanted to go eat barbeque while we were there, though. He wanted to eat it on Christmas Day. He got a real bee in his bonnet about that. And it had to be the sort of barbeque cooked at a restaurant with no table service. Out in the country, in a shack: that’s what he was looking for. But the only place we could find open that day was this pricey place, on account of it probably not being infested with rats …

Oh, Dad, what have you done?
Oh, holy Christ. I try to think about what Dad would do here. I make another PB&J (still, obviously, no kale). My stomach is in knots. My fists are clenched. Dead Mom told sleeping Ben that this all isn’t Dad’s fault. Whose fault is it?

“Are you okay, honey?” I ask Ben.

“I’m not sure how to answer that question,” Ben says. My poor brother. He looks like he needs to shave; dark hairs are sprouting on his upper lip. Dad always liked to say that we Jews are a hairy people. Being half-Jewish doesn’t make us half as hairy, Mom would interject. My little brother needs his father to teach him how to tame what will become an inevitably overgrown upper lip; he needs his mother to teach him not to wear Dad’s filthy T-shirts. At the moment, he’s stuck with me. I reach out to touch his shoulder. He moves away.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“I’m not,” I say, instantly wishing I could take it back, even though it’s true.

I try to get onto my dad’s computer. But it’s password protected, and his passwords aren’t anything obvious—not Mom’s name or ours, or our birthdays. Or his birthday. Or Roscoe’s birthday. I text Dad’s phone to ask for the password to his computer. No response. I text the same question eight or ten more times, followed by “PLEASE” in all caps. No answer.

I have what feel like four more heart attacks before around eleven, which I try quelling by engaging in deep breathing that will enhance my “Qi” or “life force,” which my dad says is bullshit and is also an important aspect to successful martial arts practice (thanks, Dad, for those clear guidelines). Once my life force seems about as prime as it’s going to get on this terrible evening, I figure we should go to the Postal Museum. It is a few miles from the house, across the Potomac and in DC. We don’t know what the J-File is, but if we go maybe we can explain to the nice kidnappers that Mom told Ben in a dream that it’s no longer with us. I’m so bereft of solutions, and so exhausted from being so bereft of solutions.

Nor do I know how to get us to the Postal Museum, for that matter. I don’t have a car; I don’t know where Dad’s car is. If I did, I’d still have to find his keys. The subway will shut down at midnight, so if we can get there, we still probably can’t get home. I don’t even have money for a stupid damn taxi.

This is all so impossible. I feel tears start. I’ve always cried easily, and often. Weirdly Dad used to tell me my “extreme vulnerability” would somehow make me a “better warrior” (??!!) if I needed to be one, because “stifling emotions leads to repression, which leads to delayed reactions” or something.

But I will my tears back, and it almost kind of works. Ben
doesn’t need me to fall apart. For Pete’s sake, I don’t need me to fall apart. Wait: an idea.

Ben and I walk to Lee’s. I see Pete through the window. He waves. Ben and I go in. Pete steps down from the small stage. He seems really happy to see us. I am trying not to cry again.