“We don’t have time,” Pete says.
“Don’t have time to get my shot brother looked at?” I say.
Pete fumbles in his jacket pocket, pulls out his phone. Hands it to me. “Dial nine-one-one,” he says.
“An ambulance?” I ask.
“Dial it!” Pete says.
I dial. “Now what?”
Pete takes the phone back from me. Holds it shoulder to ear while driving too fast. “I’d like to report a break-in,” he says. He gives his mother’s address. “Please hurry.” He hangs up the phone. Searches for something on the car door. “How do you get the window down?” he mutters before finding the button. He opens the window, throws the phone out. The cool air feels good. I close my eyes, smell the blossoming trees.
Pete says, “That’ll buy us a little time. Hopefully enough. We’ll take you to get checked.”
“Time for what?” Ben asks. “Did I miss something? I remember pulling into the driveway …”
Pete pulls into a strip mall parking lot, up to one of those drop-in clinics.
“We can get out,” he says. “But if we do, we might not get to your father in time. But we might. It might not be too late, so long as they don’t take a long time here. It’s up to you.”
I look at Ben. “How’s your arm, honey?” I ask.
“It hurts,” he says. He takes off his coat. He’s wearing a Doctor Who T-shirt underneath. I can see the wound in full, now. It looks red and sore and, well, angry and dangerous, and like the sort of thing that under ordinary circumstances would one hundred percent require the attention of a medical professional.
“Let me see?” I ask him. The wound is getting my very unprofessional attention; Ben turns, shows me his upper arm. It’s still bleeding. I can’t tell if there’s a bullet inside or if his arm’s just been grazed. It doesn’t look like he’s going to die, thank you, higher power, thank you, if you exist, which you don’t, but if you do, thank you.
“Can you wait to see the doctor?” I ask him. “Can you wait? Do you need to go now?”
“Buddy, your father is in trouble,” Pete says. “If we go in here now, it’s going to take a long time. The doctors might call the police …”
“You want to avoid the police,” I say. “Like the kidnappers. And P.F. P.F.s. Your name is Pete. What’s your middle name? What’s your middle name, Pete? Is it Francis? Or … Frankie?”
“That’s the same name,” Ben says.
“Felonious?” I say. I don’t know more male F names. I’m losing my authority here.
“Francis,” Pete says. “That is my middle name. I am, no, I was, my mother’s child. But I don’t think you understand, Zoey,” he says. “They are going to kill your father. We have to get to him first.”
“Give me your shirt,” I say to him.
“What for?” he asks.
“Tourniquet,” I say.
Pete unbuckles his seatbelt. He takes off his coat, then takes off his button-down shirt, a soft green and blue plaid he’s wearing over a plain white V-necked T-shirt. He hands me the button-down. I rip off an arm. It takes a while to get through the seams, and my biceps are aching a little from the gun, but, using my teeth, I tear it off.
“C’mere, babe,” I say to Ben, who leans forward. I tie the shirt above Ben’s gunshot wound, his gunshot wound!, and say, mostly to myself, hopefully not loud enough to alarm my bleeding brother, “I hope this works.”
Ben doesn’t cry. He doesn’t complain about the bloody injury, about me touching him. He just asks, “Can we try to get to the hospital soon enough that I won’t lose my arm to gangrene from the loss of blood flow?”
Pete rebuckles his seatbelt. I’m crying again, trying not to let Ben see. It’s my job to protect him. I think maybe I’ve failed, I’m failing, at this job.
“Where are we going?” I ask Pete.
“To get your father,” Pete says.
“Where is he? How do I know this isn’t a trap?” I say, feeling panicky again.
“I’m going to make this right,” Pete says. “Please, Zoey.” He keeps one hand on the steering wheel. Wipes my cheek with his right hand. Then puts it in my lap, picks up my left hand. “Zoey, I have to make this right,” he says again. “Buddy, we’ll do our best to get you to the doctor in time.
We’ll do our best.”
I feel that melting feeling in my head, in my stomach. My heart is pounding. I feel confusion, panic, fear, mistrust. “Where is my dad?” I say, still leaving my left hand in his right one. I still have the gun in my pocket. I feel it with my right-hand index finger. I could remove it from the pocket. Could point it at Pete. Maybe I should. Maybe I need to. “Why should I trust you?” I say, pulling out the gun, touching its nose to Pete’s fingers. Hoping Ben can’t see.
Pete keeps his hand in mine. He stares straight ahead, says, “I’m pretty sure they’re in a town in Virginia. A town called Lorton.”
Ben perks up. “Is it …” He rattles off an address.
“How did you know?” Pete asks.
“Mom told me,” Ben says. “There is a former prison in Lorton that is now an artists’ colony. Norman Mailer, the writer, was held at that prison for two days in nineteen sixty-seven, after a Vietnam War protest. That was the protest when some people tried to make the Pentagon levitate. I don’t think it’s possible to make any big building levitate. It doesn’t seem scientifically realistic.”
“I don’t think ghosts seem scientifically realistic,” I say.
“That’s true,” says Ben. “But it doesn’t directly bear on the Pentagon levitation issue.”
He then settles back into the seat and, tugging on Roscoe’s tail three times, looks down at his bloody, bound arm, picks up his economics book, and starts to read.
MOM’S MODEL HOME
Chapter Seventeen
We’re on the Beltway, stuck in traffic. One is always stuck in traffic on the highway that encircles DC. Usually it’s annoying. You have to pee, or something, and you’re inching along this massive ugly road while your brother’s spouting off facts about whatever the hell is on his mind and your dad is talking about how private roads would relieve congestion, and, back before she was killed, your mother would be singing along with the radio in her terrible voice.
Right now, mid-afternoon on Saturday—two or three days after the original deadline to get the kidnappers the J-File, I realize, depending on which day the kidnappers considered to be day one—in P.F.’s bizarre old-man car that he told us to steal from him, it’s worse. Yes, I have to pee. I always have to pee. And yes, my brother is talking about some odd, obscure thing that’s on his mind. (I can’t concentrate enough even to grasp what he’s on about this time. I keep hearing him say the word “platelets,” but I’m not getting more than that.) What I can’t hold in is my anxiety over where we are, what we’re doing, what’s to come, what’s happened.
“Can you imagine if DC had to be evacuated?” asks Ben, moving on from platelets and other blood-related matters for the moment. “If, say, a nuclear bomb were headed for the White House?” He’s looking up from his economics book, petting Roscoe. Did I not notice that he had the book with him at Mrs. Severy’s house? Why didn’t he keep the whole briefcase, then, with the J-File in it?
Color has come back to his face. The tourniquet worked. I allow myself a small sigh of relief. Roscoe’s tongue is lolling; I believe that is the technical word for it.
“We’d be incinerated while stuck in traffic,” Ben continues. “There have been proposals to expand the highway. I’m not convinced that they would actually move the cars any more quickly.”
“No?” Pete asks, absently.
I watch Ben watch Pete.
“You’re not really interested,” Ben says. “I’ll stop talking.”
Ben, I realize, is getting better at reading faces. Which means I should probably get better at hiding my feelings.
“How much longer?” I ask Pete.
“Not too far,” Pete says.
<
br /> “That could mean anything on the Beltway,” Ben observes. “Look at all the cars. The first section of the Beltway opened in nineteen fifty-seven. There was heated debate about whether to call it the Capitol Beltway or the Capital Beltway.”
“What do you mean debate? You just said the same thing twice,” I say.
“No, Capitol with an o or Capital with an a,” Ben says. “With an o it means the capitol building. With an a it means the capital city. They are homophones.” Pete chuckles. “Two words that sound the same but have different meanings,” Ben says. “Capitol and capital. Why is that funny?”
I can hear Dad’s joke in my head: “Homophonia is when people are afraid that they don’t know the difference between capitol and capital.” I can hear Mom’s correction in my head: “Capitol and capital don’t actually sound the same,” with her emphasizing the o in the one and the a in the other.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I finally say. I’m just not up for this conversation.
“But I just told you,” Ben says. “This is information. So you do know.”
“Are we almost there?” I ask again. I’m dozing off, still with one hand in Pete’s, the other around the gun on my right side. I put the gun back in my jacket pocket. It’s probably not safe to have it in my lap with my hand around it if I’m unconscious. Among other problems, Pete might take it from me. I can smell myself as I’m moving; I need a shower. I need this to be over. I really need this to be over.
“Almost,” Pete says. He starts inching into the right lane. A black Ford with darkened windows and a dent in its side almost hits him, speeding up in the lane he’s shifting into.
“Pete!” I shout.
He blares the horn of the Lincoln. “Goddamn Maryland drivers,” he says. “Maniacs.”
“You don’t think …” I say. “That’s not P.F.? Or a P.F.?”
“I think it’s just a bad driver,” Pete says.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.” I pat Pete’s leg. Then: “Pete, who is your mother?”
“She’s my mother,” he says. “What do you mean who is she?”
Now is not the time to be cagey. Unless he thinks I know more than I do. My hackles go back up. The car eases forward, foot by foot, toward the Lorton exit. I can see the sign for it just up ahead. It might as well be on the moon, as fast as we’re going to get there.
“I mean what’s her deal,” I say. “I mean why’s she involved with my life. Why did she send you to spy on me and Ben?” Then I sort of lose it. My voice cracks. “What do you think I mean who is she? What would you want to know if you were in my shoes?” My shoes, incidentally, are a pair of well-worn clogs that are not hiding my footly odor very well right now.
“I’d want to know everything,” Pete says.
“Yeah,” I say. I let go of his leg with a gesture to show that it wasn’t intimate. It was protective. “Or even just something.”
Pete puts on his turn signal. He sighs. I look back at my brother.
“How’s your arm doing, honey?” I call back to him.
“My arm hurts,” he says.
“I don’t want to tell you,” Pete says. “I don’t want you to know.” He’s looking at me. He’s staring at me. I can see something happening in my peripheral vision.
“Pete,” I say. I point forward. It’s the black Ford again, swerving into our lane.
“Goddamn Maryland drivers,” he says again, slamming on the brakes.
“Are they trying to hurt us?” I ask.
“They’d hurt us if they were trying to hurt us,” Pete says. “They wouldn’t count on a five-mile-an-hour traffic accident.”
“Who are they, Pete?” I ask.
“In the car? I don’t know—”
“Who is your mother?”
He hesitates. “She’s … complicated,” he says.
“All men think their mothers are complicated,” says Ben from the backseat. “So says Freud. Who has largely been discredited by mainstream psychoanalytic thinking.”
“Madeleine Severy is unusually complicated,” says Pete. He sighs. He looks at me. I’ve never seen him look so frightened. “Will you still like me after I tell you this?” he asks.
My stomach turns. It’s that flippy feeling of romance and it’s that flippy feeling of dread. “I don’t know what I feel about you now,” I say.
“Is he your boyfriend?” Ben asks from the backseat. I don’t answer. Neither does Pete.
We reach the exit. Drive down a stretch of prettier-than-usual strip-malled road, then take a left to a bridge that goes over a narrow river and into the world’s most charming gingerbread town. We pass a place called “Mom’s” advertising fresh pie.
“How about this?” Pete says. “I tell you the truth from now on. And the truth is: I love this place. They have the best blueberry pie I’ve ever had in my whole life. I wrote a song about it called ‘Mom’s Blueberry Pie.’ The joke of the song is that my own mom would never make pie.”
I get what Pete is trying to do. I wish like anything we were just on a friendly road trip, too: me and Pete and my brother and my (possibly drugged? brainwashed?) dog, off to this neighborhood of Victorian houses painted bright colors for pie and a picnic by the river. Like normal kids get to do. Then we’d go from here to prom because I’m not letting that one go in this fantasy version of our time together. But Pete’s mom, who’d never bake pie, and my dad … enough.
Pete pulls the car into a complex of new townhouses done up in the Victorian style the rest of the town seems to have come by more organically. He stops in front of a row of townhouses with an OPEN HOUSE sign out front. He parks. Sighs again. Gets out of the car. I follow, as does Ben, holding Roscoe’s scary leather leash with the arm that isn’t hours away from having to be cut off. Not hours. Hour. A person has about two hours without blood flow before their limb becomes permanently useless, I remember from my childhood lectures on health and safety. We’ve been out and about for about an hour now. But Ben’s bad arm isn’t bleeding; he isn’t delirious; except for an occasional wince, he doesn’t even seem all that hurt. Dad’s tourniquet worked the magic it promised. Very nice. Good for Dad.
Pete fiddles with one of those key-holding lock boxes attached to the rail leading up to the brightly painted, three-story townhouse. It opens; he gets out a key.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Model home,” he says. “Mom’s a realtor.”
“A realtor?” I ask. I hadn’t figured on the DC metro area’s competitive real estate market underlying any of our recent goddamn adventures.
“It’s her cover,” he says. “Well, not just a cover. She actually makes a lot of money selling houses.”
“Oh yeah?” I say.
“Ssh,” he says, opening the door. We walk into a perfect and yet strangely generic home. It’s got hardwood floors that look like they are made of plastic. The kitchen, right off to the right, has granite countertops, stainless appliances. A bowl of green apples sit on top of a lacquered dark brown table.
“What are we …?” I start asking.
“SSSSHHHH,” Pete says again. He gestures to follow him. First we go upstairs, tiptoeing, except Roscoe, whose nails go clip-clip-clip on the wood. We peek inside one upstairs bedroom. There’s a big platform bed in there, covered in an apple-green duvet, with nice fluffy pillows on top, and an attached bathroom, with gleaming white accoutrements. There’s no sticky dried-up pee in front of the toilet, like there always is in our house. Mom complained bitterly that she was down on her hands and knees five, six, seven times a day cleaning up the piss that Dad and Ben would leave for her. She begged them to clean it up themselves. Dad asked why we couldn’t just get one of those absorbent rugs.
“Because those urine-soaked rugs are the most disgusting objects known to man,” Mom said.
“You’re supposed to wash them a lot,” Dad replied.
“Yes, I’m supposed to wash your piss-filled rug a lot,” Mom said. “I can see that�
�s your plan, Jacob, to get out of learning how to urinate into the toilet instead of all over my floor. And nice job teaching Ben to do the same. I should get you penis-people a litterbox to use. It would be cleaner.”
After Mom was killed, Dad brought home one of those rugs that go in front of the toilet. I don’t think he’s washed it once. I always make sure to wear shoes in the bathroom. That’s my solution to living with gross penis-people.
But if I lived here, I could probably use the bathroom barefoot and not have to worry about what I’m stepping in. If I lived here, I suppose I’d be in an even weirder world than the one I’m already in, which is plenty weird.
Pete leads us into another bedroom. This one has a crib in it.
“A baby lives here?” I ask.
“SHHHH,” he says. “Jesus, Zoey. Keep quiet.”
Ben says, “That wasn’t very quiet, Pete.”
Pete rubs his head with his hands. He takes off his sunglasses. His eyes have dark circles under them.
“I don’t think they’re here,” he says. “I … I must have been wrong.”
“Who was here?” I ask.
Pete walks to the crib and looks inside it. There’s a teddy bear. It looks unused. Unloved. He hugs it.
“This was my bear,” he says. “Mom kept it on a shelf in my room when I was a kid.”
“It’s cute,” I say. “Did you love it?”
“No,” Pete says. He gives it to Roscoe, who starts chewing on it.
“Did you think my dad was here?” I ask, losing whatever was left of my patience. “Is this where we were rushing to?”
“Yes,” Pete says. “This is where we were rushing to. My mom is a real estate agent, because it gives her … a good cover story. Access to properties all over Virginia and Maryland and DC. She’s used this house to … hide certain things before. I think. I thought. I thought it was where your dad would be.”
“Cover story for what?” I ask.
“Oh, Zoey,” Pete says.
I decide to ignore him. “Let me see your arm,” I say to Ben. “Maybe we’ll just go to the hospital now. We didn’t find Dad. We can at least save your arm.”
Save the Enemy Page 17
