Save the Enemy Read online

  I figured we’d work it out. Once I went to college and Mom and I saw each other just a few weeks a year, we’d have a routine. We’d settle into one of those healthy and enjoyable mom/daughter relationships that involve a lot of shopping and silent knowing smiles over tea together. But unless there are ghosts, and she is one—and ghosts can shop—that’s not going to happen. Not even Ben believes that.

  So, one more splash of water in the bathroom mirror. One more brave face for my new schoolmates. One more attempt to make sense of the life I never really understood to begin with. At times like these (and I hate myself for it), I wonder if Ben actually has it easier than I do.

  SURELY YOU JOUST

  Chapter Two

  One of Maryland’s state sports is jousting. I think I could have been happy as a jouster, if only my parents had moved us a little farther north and gave me access to a horse. (Did you know that milk is Maryland’s state beverage? I really got fixated on Maryland for a while there.) But this is Virginia, and after school I have lacrosse practice.

  It’s hard for me to emphasize just how much I hate this sport. In Rhode Island I’d never really been aware of the existence of lacrosse. These Virginia kids seem to have been handed long sticks with nets shortly after birth. I’d understand using one to catch a butterfly. But to throw a very hard ball from one person to another, ultimately flinging it at some poor schlub standing in front of a goal? The strange part is that the nicest kids at my new school really love lacrosse. (Even the super-smart girl who’s already gotten into Harvard and is likely to become a cardiac surgeon.) All these Shenandoah School girls: they are polite and persuasive, sporty yet bookish. That’s how they convinced me. They said lacrosse would be easy. They said that it’d be a great way to meet people. And so fun, especially the away games. Time off from afternoon classes! Special treatment! A bus ride to a new place!

  Mom agreed. It would be a first for her otherwise blank Zoey checklist: check, my disappointing daughter is participating in team sports for once. Never mind that I’m terrible at athletics, except for occasionally thriving when performing Dad’s martial arts, which I’m certain he made up along the way. And that’s not due to any natural ability. It’s just all the years with him in the backyard. He once taught me how to use a sword, for Christ’s sake, using a big black-smithed thing I could barely lift, that we got at a Renaissance Faire. “In this dangerous world, it is important to know how to outwit and immobilize a foe with a weapon.” Granted, I refused to train anymore with him right around the time Mom suggested I get fitted for an IUD. Swinging swords and kicking an invisible enemy’s ass no longer held the same appeal. Still, my muscles probably remember something. Maybe.

  Dad was right, though, I guess. To his credit, he doesn’t bring it up. I wonder if he wishes (as I do) that he or I had been with Mom during the attack so we could have fought back. That we could have pulled out our sword, which I believe is still somewhere in the house. Or in a perfect world, Mom had joined in with Dad and me when I was a kid. That she had known and practiced jiu-Dadsu and clumsy sword-fighting herself.

  But, no. And now, lacrosse.

  I’m the girl who always comes home with a clean uniform. This is a big no-no in group sports. I want to quit the team. Naturally, the Shenandoah headmaster won’t let me. (Mr. Standiford is one of the well-meaning grown-ups who first asked me what mom was really like.)

  Today, for instance, I spend the two-hour practice—two hours!—throwing the ball down the field, then racing to pick it up and dribbling back to where I started. It’s a lot like being a dog, playing fetch with myself, except that Roscoe and Galt enjoyed fetch. The other girls interact with each other and learn plays. At least I think they do; I am not a hundred percent sure what a “play” is, and when it’s all over I wait in the parking lot for Dad to pick me up, wishing I could curl up and melt into the asphalt.

  One by one, the girls leave. All offer me a comic “Good practice!” as they hop into their cars or are picked up by their own parents. They mean well; they really do. They feel sorry for me. I am both New Girl and Tragic Figure. I feel sorry for me, too.

  Half an hour later I am alone.

  As discussed, Dad tries to be devoted but is absentminded. You’d think that an Objectivist would be full of the fire of life or something.

  I try calling his cell phone. Straight to voice mail. I doubt he’s charged it this week. Best-case scenario: he’s at a shelter picking up Roscoe. Most likely: he’s forgotten he has children and is at home on the Internet studying compelling new arguments on the wisdom of returning to the gold standard. Ben has actually tried to explain to Dad why returning to the gold standard is not, in fact, wise—especially if the United States wishes to keep participating in the global economy. Dad doesn’t care if the United States drops out of the global economy, not if it means we no longer have a “fiat currency.”

  They’ve had this conversation many times. Maybe they’re having it now.

  I pick up my schoolbag, which weighs sixteen tons, and start walking home. We live about a mile and a half from Shenandoah. It’s not an impossible walk. Half an hour, very picturesque. But my legs are tired from all that fetching. My brain is tired from all that trying-to-hold-my-shit-together. As I shamble down the street, I hear someone call my name.

  “Zoey!”

  This guy, Pete, is right at the edge of the parking lot, beeping from the driver’s seat of an old brown Volvo. His mom gave it to him. It’s actually one of the few things I know about him, because at Shenandoah, having an old brown Volvo is laughable. (Not in a mean way; nothing is done in a mean way here. People just find the old brown Volvo amusing. I don’t quite get the joke.) Pete and his twin sister, Abby, are in my class. Both of them are boarders. Abby is nice. I thought she was going to be the goofy sort of person I could become close with, especially after she told me—apropos only of sitting beside me at the same lunch table—that she was on the competitive roller-skating circuit. Yes! Weird, like my jiu-Dadsu. A competitive roller skater would be exactly the sort of person I could really let loose with.

  Then I started asking about Pete, at which point she got sort of deflated. I also found out she was planning to get a PhD in biology after studying foreign relations at Georgetown. I’m still hoping, despite my up-and-down grades (some As, mostly in English, some C-minuses, mostly in anything that requires memorization or equations, then a bunch of B-pluses), to get into Berkeley. I think I’m the last kid in my class not to have heard back from the good colleges. I’d feel so much more connected with Shenandoah if I met even one person here who cared about jeans, aspired to be on reality TV, and was likely to become a mid-level state government employee. Pete wants to be a singer-songwriter, which may sound promising on the mediocrity front, but he already gets paid to perform.

  “Hey, need a ride?” he asks. The passenger-side window is rolled down.

  I lean in. I probably don’t smell fantastic.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “I can walk.”

  “You live in Old Town, right?” Pete says. “I’m on my way to a gig there anyway. At Lee’s. You should come by. It’s a cool place.”

  Lee’s is a Civil War-themed restaurant and bar in Old Town Alexandria, a few blocks from the small townhouse where I live. Dad has forbidden me to eat there because Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who is from Alexandria, was obviously “on the wrong side of the war.” (Though I’ll note there are a number of Virginians who don’t think that’s so obvious.) I’ll add that my dad actually had to explain to me his reasons for thinking Lee was on the wrong side. In general, Dad fully supports states’ rights, which would ordinarily mean he’d be on Lee’s side. “If the slaves themselves, who are people, are unable to participate in the decision-making process about their own fates, then it’s hard to understand the Confederacy’s demands as being a true exercise of states’ rights. Politics and personhood must coalesce. Understood?”

  “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.”

  HELLO PM COLUMBUS

  Chapter Three

  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.