Save the Enemy

by Arin Greenwood

  I gaze at him. I feel my mouth hanging open, my eyes blinking too slowly.

  “Pull yourself together, Zoey,” he says in his nasal voice. “I told you this is serious.”

  “Who’s gone after her?” I ask.

  “Another of the P.F.s,” he says. “We don’t have time now. Just trust me, Zoey. You have to if you’re going to get through this.”

  I don’t trust him, obviously, but I have to follow when he guides me through a massive granite and stainless kitchen to a screened-in room at the back of the house. It’s blocked off with a sliding glass door. It seems like such a cozy addition to this kind of cold, impressive living space. I think I can see a fire burning in a fireplace. I can definitely see Pete, standing, gesticulating. He looks furious. I can hear him, sort of. Moving closer, I can hear more.

  “I know you think I’m incompetent and I know you think you should have sent Abby instead of me. I don’t care. I’m tired of trying to impress you. I know you think I’m a fuckup, Mom, and you always will. Well, so who cares. At least I’m not evil, Mom. At least I’m not evil.”

  Roscoe barks. I then see that Mrs. Severy is sitting on a floral couch. Roscoe is sitting at her feet. She’s elegant, in the middle of this, and still has my dog.

  Ben is sitting on a matching floral loveseat, kitty corner to Mrs. Severy’s.

  P.F. slides the door open. We come into the room.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, looking from person to person.

  Mrs. Severy takes a deep, exasperated breath. “My son is explaining to me that I find him a disappointment and always have,” she says. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s true, Mom!” he shouts.

  “Keep your voice down,” she says. “You’re not a disappointment. You’re my son. However, you promised you could take care of things. You haven’t. Now I’ll have to pick up the pieces. Tie up the loose ends.”

  “Zoey isn’t a loose end, Mother,” he says.

  Well, what?

  “In fact she is, Peter,” says Mrs. Severy. “Both these children are.”

  “I thought you’d be reasonable,” Pete says. He sounds desperate. His voice has a little squeak to it.

  I’m hovering near the door. I’d like to collect my dog and my brother and get out of here, but I’m just hovering. Timid. Always so timid. I wasn’t raised to be timid, I just turned out that way. Can’t play lacrosse. Can’t collect my dog and save my brother and my father and my friend and Jesus, there are a lot of people who need saving right now.

  “I thought you’d be mature enough to fulfill your responsibilities,” says Mrs. Severy. She uncrosses her legs at the ankles. Shifts in the sofa. P.F. starts to move as well. He turns his head to look at Ben. He pulls out a gun.

  Without realizing I’m going to do it, or else probably the timidity would hold me back, I run at him. I can hear my dad’s voice in my head: “Use your shoulder, aim for the soft middle, but high enough that you will make your opponent unsteady.” I don’t even know if Dad was right, but this is the best I can do. I aim for P.F.’s padded middle. I make contact. I hear a gunshot, then Ben’s quiet voice, which says, so simply, so devastatingly, “Zoey, I’m hurt.”

  INSURANCE

  Chapter Sixteen

  I run to my brother. He’s lying on the couch, not moving. There’s blood on his jacket. I’m looking at his head, his chest, his stomach, his neck, trying not to touch or jostle him too much or upset him more.

  “Where are you hurt, honey?” I say to Ben. He doesn’t respond. “Why did you do this to him?” I cry out to P.F.

  “We have to run,” Pete says. “Zoey, we have to run right now.”

  “I don’t know where he’s hurt,” I say to Pete. I look at Mrs. Severy, who continues to sit on the couch, somewhat imperviously, imperiously. Roscoe’s nose is in the air. He is staring in our direction. He must want to come over to us. He must. He doesn’t come.

  P.F. is back on his feet, one hand holding the small of his back, which I suppose hurts since he’s old and old people’s backs always hurt when they fall. With his other hand, he’s pointing the gun at Pete still.

  “I’m going to need you to come with me,” P.F. is saying, wincing at the same time.

  “Shut up,” I say. Then I scream it. “SHUT UP.”

  I turn back to my brother. I can tell he’s disassociating. He used to do this a lot when he was younger, before they got the meds right. It’s part of why he needed so many doctors, so many diagnoses. When a situation would get stressful, he’d react either by becoming madly destructive—breaking plates, throwing things, pulling his own hair out, punching whatever was around—or by disassociating. Becoming comatose, basically. Losing track of the world.

  Sometimes those two states would work in tandem. He’d go into a dissociative lapse and be destructive while he’d be like that, then not remember it afterwards. Dad described it as a sort of “fugue state.” He liked to add that many geniuses went into such “fugue states” while they were at their most productive. Which didn’t seem too applicable in our case, unless you considered smashing every water glass in the house as being Ben’s “most productive.”

  He doesn’t do either much anymore. Meds helped. Then through some cognitive therapy, Ben learned self-calming techniques like deep breathing and self-analysis, and a bit of chilling the hell out, which got him off the meds. That’s how we’ve gotten away with this irregular schedule during Dad’s disappearance, and our search for Dad, and all the new people, and none of his regular diet. I guess being shot at Pete’s mom’s house while we’re madly trying to find Dad has been a step beyond what self-calming can really take care of.

  P.F. starts talking again, as I’m still trying to go over my brother, find out where he’s hurt, find out how hurt he is. I’ve got the buzzy feeling in my head, but I’m also focusing, focusing on Ben, focusing on solving this one problem because I can’t handle more than one shot-brother-sized problem at a time.

  “You’re going to have to come with me,” he’s saying.

  I pull the gun out of my jacket pocket and point it back at him. “I don’t think that’s the case,” I say. “I think that isn’t the case at all.”

  I’ve never used a gun before, but from having watched a terrific amount of police procedurals on television, I have some sense of how the contraption works—in addition to all those years of other, as it’s turning out somewhat surprisingly useful, self-defense training exercises Dad put me through.

  Like I’ve seen (fictional) cops and murderers do countless times, I cock the trigger—at least I think that’s what it’s called, what I do, when you jiggle the gun in various ways and prepare to shoot it. I could pull the trigger. I could kill P.F. right now. Kill Mrs. Severy. Pete’s mother. I could kill Pete’s mother. I could kill myself. I could cry for even having that thought.

  “We have to leave, Zoey,” Pete says. He takes the gun from my hand. Keeps aiming it at P.F., then turning it toward his mother. “We’re leaving,” he says. His face looks strangely exhilarated, that lovely round face with a veneer of sweat on it, beneath that springy hair.

  He puts on a pair of sunglasses pulled from his pocket, thick, plastic, ironic rich-kid ones, then nudges my brother. “Buddy, can you walk?” Ben doesn’t answer. “Buddy?”

  “You’re going to have to carry him,” I say. Pete hands me back the gun. “You okay with this?” he asks me. I nod. But I’m not okay with this. Really, really not okay with this. What choice do I have, though? I keep the gun aimed at the adults in the room while Pete scoops up my lumpy brother, still catatonic, still bleeding. I see, as he’s lifting him, a tear in his jacket toward the upper arm, blood emanating from that tear. I heave a sigh of relief. It’s just the upper arm where Ben’s been shot. These are the thoughts of my life, right at this moment, with my dad missing and Pete’s mom trying to … to what? I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

  “Come on, Roscoe,” I say to the dog as we’re walking out of the room, m
y brother comatose, Pete having what seems an inappropriate smile on that lovely face, me carrying a gun.

  Roscoe looks up at Mrs. Severy. He’s waiting for her permission to leave with me. Oh, god, this, this, is too much. I start to cry. “Come on, Roscoe,” I say again. Mrs. Severy doesn’t say a word.

  “Adolfo, you’re a very good boy,” she says calmly.

  I walk over to Adolfo. Roscoe. Mrs. Severy’s on the couch. I look her in the eye as I grab Roscoe’s collar and start to drag him.

  “Please, Roscoe,” I say. I’m sobbing. “Please.”

  I point the gun at the ceiling. Mrs. Severy reaches out and starts to take it from my hand. I pull the trigger. The trigger is looser, I guess is the word for it, than I’d have expected. It shoots easily. Smoothly. A bullet shoots up into the ceiling. I’m surprised how much kickback there is. So much I can feel it in my bicep. I flinch, but feel some power in me as well. I have agency. I have a gun.

  “Come with me now, Roscoe,” I shout. I point the gun at Mrs. Severy now, again, looking her in the eye. Her eyes look so much like Pete’s. Those hazel eyes. I’d have thought she would have ice-blue eyes, but no, soft hazel, with some lines and wrinkles around them that make her seem even more elegant and powerful and some makeup stuck in those lines and wrinkles that undoes some of her elegance and power, but not by a lot.

  I grab Roscoe’s collar again and drag, and drag, and finally he starts to walk, reluctantly; I don’t know what this woman has done to my dog, but he’s my dog, and goddamnit it, he’s coming with me. I think about pointing the gun at him to make him move faster, then I cry even harder when I realize I’m having this thought.

  P.F. follows us to the front door. I’m dragging Roscoe with one hand, holding the gun in P.F.’s direction with the other hand, trying not to hook that loose trigger again, because I am scared and I am confused but I am not, no I am not, a nihilist. (It goes without saying that I know this because Dad sat me down, at age ten or eleven, over ice cream to tell me about the nihilists, who believe, in essence, that life is objectively pointless. “Libertarians don’t necessarily think that life is without objective truths or morals. Our point is that the government shouldn’t be telling people what to do except under a few extremely limited circumstances. And they certainly shouldn’t be able to take forty percent of my income to pay for wars we shouldn’t be involved with. Or public schools,” I recall him saying. “But if you decide later, when you’re older, that you are a nihilist, then that’s your choice.”)

  Pete, ahead of me, carries a still-comatose Ben, dripping blood on that lovely white marble in the foyer, with that big elephant looking out from the second-story landing. It might be a real elephant, killed and stuffed and exhibited now, forever, to look out on this marble expanse that leads to the outdoors, the wilds of DC’s wealthiest suburbs.

  When we walk through the front door, P.F. says to me, “I can help you still.”

  “HOW?” I yell.

  “We have to leave,” Pete says, urgently.

  “Where is Roscoe’s leash?” I ask P.F. I’m sobbing again. “Please get me his leash.”

  P.F. disappears for a moment. He might not come back, I think, but he does, carrying a heavy leather leash with some sort of harness attached to it. We walked Roscoe on a hot pink piece of webbing Dad had picked up from a discount pet emporium, attached to a fake leather collar that he is no longer wearing.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “Madeleine had this custom-made,” says P.F.

  I try to attach it to the dog. I don’t know how it works. This is like what I imagine creepier adults use when they are enjoying naked time with other creepy adults.

  “Here,” P.F. says. He bends down and, with a few motions, wraps Roscoe in the leather in a way that makes him walkable. He looks at me. “I can still help you,” he says. “I could have killed your dog. Or your brother. Or you. I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t kill Mrs. Severy, either,” I say.

  “Come on,” says Pete.

  I take the leather leash and walk out the door. P.F. stands there watching. I’m not sure where Mrs. Severy is. Pete keeps looking back, like he’s making sure she’s not following. Or like he’s hoping to see her.

  We get outside into the bright day. It’s spring. It feels like real spring now. The trees have pink buds on them. I’m told cherry blossom season is DC’s nicest time of year. The air is warm, not hot. The air smells delicious. I shield my eyes with my hand.

  “Where’s the car?” I ask Pete.

  “Oh no,” he says, still with my limp, large brother slung over his shoulder. “Molly had the keys.”

  We stand on that path, just outside the house. I’m holding a gun in one hand, Roscoe’s S&M-style leash in the other. Molly is missing. Where she’s gone to, I don’t know. I hope she’s okay. It was probably smart to flee when she did, except she took our only mode of transportation with her. I don’t think Mom would have told her to do that.

  “We could … what’s it called? We could carjack a car,” I suggest.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Pete says. “If the people whose car we take call the police, we could end up …”

  “In jail?” I say.

  P.F. is still lingering—you might even say malingering—in the doorway.

  “Point the gun at me,” he says quietly.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Point it,” he whispers.

  I lift my arm, point the gun at him.

  “Shoot into the foyer,” he says. “Make sure you don’t hit anyone.”

  I aim at the elephant and shoot. My bicep hurts again. Maybe more this time; it’s still sore from the last shot. But I hit the elephant. I’m okay with the gun.

  “Demand my car keys now,” he says.

  “Give me your keys,” I hear myself saying.

  “Louder,” he says.

  I say it louder. “Give me the keys! GIVE ME THE KEYS, GODDAMNIT!”

  He reaches into the pocket of his rumpled pleated khaki pants. I notice that the hems are frayed, like he’s been walking on them, dragging them on the ground. He hands me a black key.

  We go into the long, long driveway, covered in crushed white shells. P.F.’s Lincoln is parked close to the big garage. Pete lays Ben into the backseat.

  “He needs his seatbelt,” I say. My parents always make us wear our seatbelts. Made us wear our seatbelts.

  “It’ll hurt him,” Pete says. “It’ll touch him where he’s been shot.”

  “Uh huh,” I say. Where he’s been shot. Where Ben’s been shot. “So we’ll go to the hospital now.”

  “We can’t,” Pete says.

  “Why not?” I ask. “Why not? He’s been shot.” That sounds reasonable. Get shot, go to the doctor. Brother is shot, brother needs doctor.

  Pete slams his hands on the steering wheel several times. “That’s not what I thought would happen,” he says. “Once she saw you in person, I thought she’d be reasonable. That she’d understand.”

  “Understand what?” I ask.

  He hits his hands on the steering wheel again, but more softly. He breathes out several times, loudly. “I want to come clean,” he says. “I really do.”

  “I need you to take my brother to the hospital,” I say. I can feel the rage boiling up inside of me again. And the power that comes with holding the gun. “Because that man who was with your mother shot him.”

  “If we do that, we may not get to your father in time,” Pete says.

  And then I shut up and start listening.

  Pete explains to me what I must have known since we got to his mother’s house, maybe longer, if I’d been paying attention. The P.F.s work for his mother. He doesn’t know exactly what his mother does for a living, but he does know that she has a number of P.F.s working for her. He doesn’t know if P.F. is their real name. It’s the only name he’s ever known any of them by. Maybe for exactly this reason, so they can’t be identified by name.

  Mo
st of the P.F.s are, as far as he knows, widowers—“They’re widowers, Zoey,” Pete says, the implication hanging in the air that they are widowers because of his mother, somehow. The implication being that my father is another of the P.F.s, maybe, when he is on the job. That Dad is a widower, and I am motherless, because of his mother.

  She’d asked him to keep close watch on Zoey and Ben. To try to find the J-File. Which is in Molly’s car. Which is somewhere. Hopefully somewhere safe.

  “Why?” I ask, again, always.

  “I wanted to impress her,” he says, not answering the question I really wanted answered, which is why does she want the J-File? What is all of this?

  But now he’s crying. I can see the tears streaming down that face that I’m still amazed by, with its eyes I can’t see behind the thick sunglasses, which is good, probably, seeing as how much those eyes look like someone who is the enemy of my family, I think.

  “She didn’t think I was up for it. For keeping track of you and Ben. Or looking for the J-File. She thought my sister should do this, but I wanted to do it. To show her that I’m not such a fuckup,” Pete says. “But, I guess I am a fuckup, Zoey. Because I fell … for you. And I thought if we went there, I could convince her to leave us be …”

  “Leave us be?” I say. “And my dad? And you and I are just supposed to … to what? To date? To go to the prom?” And as much as I hate to admit it, there’s a part of me that still thinks I would like to go to the prom with Pete.

  “We don’t have proms at Shenandoah,” Pete says.

  “Seriously?”

  “My arm hurts. I’m bleeding. It hurts,” says my brother from the backseat, with that changing, warbly voice of his. “Why am I bleeding? What’s Roscoe doing here?” I turn around in my seat and see Ben petting our dog. Giving the dog an awkward, joyful little hug. “Roscoe! Welcome home, Roscoe!” Roscoe’s mouth lolls open. His tail thumps a little bit. At least Roscoe is happy! “Ow,” Ben says. “It hurts. Are we going to a doctor?”