Save the Enemy Read online

  We walk a few blocks and find his black Lincoln sedan. I get in the front seat and P.F. explains his car-buying philosophy, as if this were a natural conversation to have. “I always buy a luxury car that isn’t trendy,” he says. “I can get more car for the money that way.” He shows me a panel that lets each front-seat passenger control their own air temperature.

  “That mattered more when I was married.”

  Now he has my attention. “Oh yeah?” I ask. “So how did you and Mom meet?”

  “Through mutual acquaintances,” he says, waving his left hand a little bit. He’s still got a thin gold band on his ring finger. Did he and my mom have an affair? That is the most preposterous idea yet, I think. I stare out the window as we drive over the Key Bridge, look at the few boats enjoying this spring Saturday night on the Potomac. Through Rosslyn, which is a grim and militaristic-looking place, then through some of the other Virginia suburbs, which are grim without seeming especially militaristic.

  Pete tries to make conversation, asking if anyone’s seen any good movies lately. P.F. Greenawalt describes a Hallmark movie he saw on television that weekend.

  “It turns out that Hallmark films pack a surprising emotional punch,” he concludes.

  He and Pete get to talking about what makes for a good film, and if a good film has to have any meaningful intellectual content or if it’s sufficient for the viewer merely to be emotionally engaged. Pete argues that art has to have some intellectual content to be good, and that he always makes sure his songs are more than just cheap tearjerkers. P.F. says he thinks artists who over-rely on intellectual content are lazy.

  “I truly can’t believe I’m hearing you say this,” Pete keeps repeating. “You’re saying that Hallmark moviemakers are the most honest artists?”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” P.F. says back, spiritedly, nasally, this odd man who likes the Renaissance and has my blood on his pants, and is driving us home in his old-man car.

  I actually have mixed opinions on this topic, but I keep them to myself. Part of me wonders if P.F. is trying to get us to lower our collective guards so he can kill us all and bury us in our backyard. Joke’s on him; we don’t have a backyard. We drive through Crystal City, which has a revolving restaurant/bar that we all went to when we first moved to the area, so we could see the monuments “in the round.” Mom’s words, uttered after having gotten a little tipsy on pink cocktails as the bar was going around and around and around. We spent hours there, looking out over the Reagan National Airport (which Mom refused to call the “Reagan National Airport”; she’d only call it “National Airport”), the Jefferson Memorial, the Pentagon, time and time again.

  Dad made a big deal about the Pentagon, pointing out the part of it still black and ruined from where a plane hit it on 9/11. He said that there shouldn’t be a Pentagon, shouldn’t be a state-sponsored military.

  “Do you know why houses are so ungodly expensive in this area?” he asked me.

  “Because they’re nice?” I said.

  He had only been drinking coffee with whipped cream on it and had become a little bit agitated from the caffeine and sugar and views of government expansion.

  “Because of defense contractors,” he said. “That big Pentagon spends billions of dollars per year buying airplanes and missiles and tanks. The people around here make millions persuading the Pentagon to buy their airplanes instead of the other guys’. It’s a racket.”

  As the restaurant rotated, the Jefferson Memorial came into view. This thing of glowing white marble, with columns and a round roof, built to honor the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, which I’d been reading as part of my American History class.

  “It’s so pretty,” I remarked, mostly to change the subject “When can we go see it in person?”

  “Never. There shouldn’t be a Lincoln Memorial, either,” Dad said. “Don’t get me started on Lincoln. The only thing he was good for was his strategy when it comes to enemies. It’s wrong to create worshipful white marble shrines for politicians, as if they’re Roman gods.”

  “And getting rid of slavery.”

  “Well, yes, of course that, too,” said Dad, before embarking into a new tirade about Jefferson and his monument and its political-slash-economic implications. “The monument was built by FDR.”

  “But it’s Thomas Jefferson.”

  “He’s a power-monger who’d enslave a country of freedom-lovers to advance his own political aims,” said my Dad. “And the monument was built by FDR. You’ll notice that all the quotations inside the Jefferson Memorial sound like Jefferson would have supported FDR’s political agenda.” He snorted in an annoyed and jauntily self-righteous manner. “The New Deal never should have happened!”

  P.F. Greenawalt doesn’t give us any lectures about the New Deal on our drive along the George Washington Memorial Parkway. He drops us outside the house. He does not pull a gun or knife on us. He smiles, a sad and tired smile, and says goodnight. I open the door, wave goodbye. Ben and Pete come inside with me. I feel another strange surge of relief, even though I shouldn’t.

  “Brush your teeth,” I say to Ben. He starts to go up the stairs.

  “Wait,” I say to Pete. “I’ll be right back.”

  I follow Ben upstairs and plant myself in front of him. “Ben. Ben. You can’t do that. You can’t leave without telling me where you are going. You can’t walk to Georgetown. You can’t carry a gun. You can’t leave without telling me.”

  “I told that girl to tell you,” he says. “By the transitive property that is telling you.”

  “Ben,” I say. I want to hug him and slap him. I don’t do either. “Were you scared?”

  “I didn’t like the party,” he says. “There were too many drunk people. None of them said anything interesting.”

  “Ben, please, if you see Mom tonight. Ask her where we can find the J-File.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “I love you, honey,” I say. I try to hug him. He pulls away and bows. That’s friendlier than it could have been.

  I change into my orange T-shirt and some shorts and go back downstairs. Pete is sitting on the couch. He is strumming a ukulele—a little toy instrument that Mom collected from somewhere and put on display. I didn’t even know it could be played.

  “You’re just a little girl trapped in a kooky whirl,” he’s singing. “You’ve got a little brother, kind of strange but not a bother. You are mysterious. Sometimes so serious. Other times imperious. Still other times so nervous.”

  He stops and looks at me. “It’s true, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Hey, thanks for … you know. Thanks.”

  “Of course,” he says. “I know what it’s like when your parents are gone a lot.”

  “Is that why you’re being … so nice?” I ask. I feel shy. I feel depleted.

  “That’s one reason,” he says. Then he asks if he can stay on the couch tonight, instead of out in the car.

  “Okay,” I say. I tug on my shirt.

  “Sit down,” he says. “Come hang out with me.”

  I sit on the couch shyly, like it’s not my house. He keeps playing the ukulele. I watch a little, then get up, get a book, sit back down again. It’s one of the new age books. This one is about palm reading. I find the section about “lifelines” and try to find mine on my left palm. It seems awfully short …

  Pete takes my hand and looks at it. “I met a palm reader in India who taught me how to do some basic readings,” he says.

  “Is my lifeline too short?” I ask, trying to make out as if it’s funny that I might have a really, really short lifeline, like it might not mean that I’m going to die.

  Pete moves his face in to examine my hand more closely. He traces his index finger along my palm. It makes me feel all a-quivery, on high alert.

  “What happened here?” he asks, ever so gently tapping the Band-Aid.

  “Hangnail,” I say, not very loudly.

  He goes back to examin
ing the other parts of my hand for what feels like a very, very long time. Like, if the broken lifeline means what I think it means, then I might be dead by the time he’s done even looking at it.

  But I’m not. He says, “I’m trying to remember. I was in India a few years ago now. But I think when it’s broken like that, it means that things are about to change.”

  “Oh,” I say. I’m still feeling lost in this moment. But I also can’t quite tell what kind of moment we’re having here exactly. It’s feeling like a very soft and tender moment.

  “Don’t be scared of change,” he says. “Life is change.”

  “I’m scared of life,” I say quietly, then laugh, but not in a “Ha ha!” kind of way. More like a “What the fuck am I going to do?” kind of way.

  “You seem to be doing okay,” he says. “You’re going to be okay.”

  He’s smiling. I’m dying inside. In two scary days, I’ve come to depend on him. It scares me to be attached to anyone—best friends ditch you when you bed their exes; parents die, get kidnapped—and it seems especially stupid to get attached to someone I don’t actually know. Who doesn’t actually know me. I have no way to predict what he will do. If he will stay even when he asks if he can stay. Or anything else. About anyone.

  “I’ll get you some sheets,” I say, breaking up whatever it is that’s happening here. I go upstairs, get the sheets, blankets, pillows. A towel for the morning. He gets up off the couch. I make it into a bed.

  “Goodnight,” he says to me as I go up to my own bed. “Don’t be scared.”

  FIRE

  Chapter Seven

  I dream of my mother. It’s the dream I had a lot when I was a kid. I’m running through a dark path in the woods. My mother is chasing me. I keep falling. She’s getting closer. I am terrified. I wake up remembering that Pete is downstairs. I look at my lifeline, which is still broken, and get up to go check on my brother.

  He’s not there. I feel the dread rising—is he off with the gun having another adventure?—but he’s downstairs in the den, watching CNN and scribbling in his notebook.

  I sit down next to him on the yellow velvet couch. “Hey, hon,” I say. “Sleep okay?”

  He grunts and keeps writing.

  “Did …” I look up to make sure Pete won’t hear. Maybe he’s still asleep. Or was never here to begin with. “Mom? You saw Mom last night?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “What did she say?”

  “I’m writing it down before I forget,” he says. “Can you please stop talking?”

  Pete bursts in and says, full of energy, “Buddy! Brunch?”

  Ben lays down his pen. “This is useless,” he says. “You people are impossible.”

  “So, brunch then?” Pete says. “It’s only Saturday. You have two days to do your homework.”

  “We could go without you and leave you to get your … homework … done,” I say. “If you swear to God you won’t leave the house.”

  “You know that I don’t believe in God,” Ben says. “So you know that oath is meaningless.”

  “But you believe in promises,” I say. “Remember? Dad told us that breaking promises is a violation of the categorical imperative?” I look at Pete. Our tender moment has evaporated. Back to pure awkward. “It’s Kant,” I say. “The German philosopher? He said that not breaking promises is a perfect duty toward others.”

  “You really like the Germans,” Pete says. “Nietzsche, Kant. I thought you were Jewish.”

  “Culturally,” I say. “And still only on my Dad’s side.”

  “Ayn Rand said Kant was wrong,” Ben says. “Dad only told us otherwise so we wouldn’t lie to him.”

  “Pete and I are going to get some food,” I say to him. “You can come with us and eat. Or if you want to work on your homework and you promise your sister that you won’t leave the house or turn on the stove, then you can stay home.”

  “Buddy, you should come,” Pete says. “Lee makes a great breakfast.”

  “I can make myself something here,” Ben says. I glare at him, then remember that he does not pick up on facial cues.

  “No turning on the stove,” I tell him.

  “I’ll have cereal,” he says.

  I put on my orange T-shirt again, with some jeans. Squirt a little hairspray into my bangs, then fluff them up the tiniest bit. Is this an attractive look? It is not necessarily an attractive look. I don’t quite know how to give myself a definitively attractive look, however. Maybe I will buy some new T-shirts, when I have access to money again. No more floral dresses, though.

  We walk over to the restaurant. It is Saturday morning. No one is carrying a gun, though. Because this is an open-carry state, I have been given to understand that I might sometimes see regular people with holsters. I haven’t noticed that so far, though.

  People with baby strollers holding unbleached tote bags with green leaves and flowers poking out the top are walking up and down King Street, presumably to and from the farmers market that’s held on the ground of Alexandria’s City Hall. Where slaves were once sold, now preppy folks can pick up heirloom tomatoes and homemade jam. (Both of which are, incidentally, delicious.) I notice myself looking for smokers. Is Dad’s kidnapper around? I’m on the lookout for smokers the way Roscoe used to be on the lookout for squirrels. What am I going to do if I see one? Point? Bark? Run up and ask, “DO YOU HAVE MY DAD?”

  We get to Lee’s. The restaurant is having a special Civil War brunch. We get a table right away. A waitress, wearing a long dress, a prim bonnet, and a pin that reads “My Name Is Britney” brings us coffee and plates of cornmeal pancakes and some fried meats. I drink the coffee. It is not coffee.

  “What is this?” I ask Britney when she next appears.

  “Chicory,” she explains. “Coffee wasn’t available during the war.”

  Lee comes over to the table. She is wearing a hoop skirt, with her hair parted in the middle, pulled into a low bun.

  “Hello, children!” she says. Then she stops. “You, girl. Your aura is a mess. What is going on?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I say. I’m touched she noticed and asked. But I also think she might be a little stupid for believing in auras.

  “Nothing my behind,” she says. “Come back. I’m going to give you a reading.”

  I start getting up from the table. Pete, too. Lee tells Pete to sit back down.

  “Readings aren’t theater,” she says.

  Lee and I walk past the mostly empty tables to a small office at the back of the restaurant. Her office seems oddly sterile. Lee seems like such a warm person, and at least once she wore such a colorful muumuu, I thought that she’d have, like, kids’ paintings in the office or some framed original pop art. Instead, there’s just some framed, dusty black-and-white photos of what might be Robert E. Lee and company. And some fairly austere furniture.

  She has me sit on a hard wooden chair at a round, tiled table. Shuffling a deck of cards, Lee asks me how things are going: school, family, health. “Love?”

  At that, I blush.

  “Cut the deck,” she instructs me. I split it at what looks like the halfway point. Lee flips cards, places them into a sort of funky-looking H shape on the plain-wood, piney-smelling table, and looks at me with her eyebrows raised.

  “Do you believe that the cards really connect with … the spiritual world?” I ask. “You think there is a spiritual world to connect with?”

  “Honey, I have no idea. I can only tell you that the cards tell me things, and I tell those things to other people, and those people find what I have to say useful from time to time. And, this is not entirely related, but for some reason I am nearly certain I was a medium named Betty Cockburn in Georgetown in the eighteen sixties,” she says. “An aide to the Lincolns.”

  “So you do support the North?” I ask.

  “Let’s see what the cards tell us,” Lee says. She looks over the colorful, spooky array, pausing on a card that appears to show a man in a tunic carrying a sat
chel, accompanied by a small dog.

  “The Fool,” she says. “He symbolizes new beginnings. But he also tells you to watch your step before you walk over a cliff. And now here,” she says, flipping over another card, “The Lovers. Well that seems obvious.”

  She looks at the cards, turning them over one by one. A woman who may be pregnant. A man with a sword. A skeleton riding a horse. Three swords going through a heart. I don’t like the look on Lee’s face. I do wish she’d say I’m about to take horseback-riding lessons.

  “Honey, what is happening in your life right now? I am getting a serious sense of urgency from these cards,” she says.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I say, feeling a little well of panic and of wanting to talk. Lee has this earth-mother air about her, even with her Civil War dress and hairdo. I could easily unburden to her. Are tarot readers required to maintain confidentiality?

  “Honey, these cards are telling me that there is big time shit going down. And that you need to deal with it,” she says. “You don’t have all the time in the world. People could die.”

  “Do you know what I should do?” I ask. My throat catches. I do not believe in tarot cards. But I truly need guidance. In general, I rely on either logic or authority to get me through situations. I figure out the right thing to do by thinking about it. Or Mom and Dad tell me what to do. I’ve got no way to know what I should do in this situation. And there’s no one to tell me.

  “Do I call the police?” I ask.

  “I can’t tell you how to proceed. I can only tell you that the time is now. You have to make choices. Understanding that this is a mixed message, I am saying you can’t wait for other people to tell you what to do. You have to take action. You are angry, but don’t let the anger stop you from doing what needs to be done.”

  “Can you see … is my dad to blame? Can you see … things … about him? About my mom?” I assume Lee knows about my mom’s murder; everyone knows, I think.