Save the Enemy

by Arin Greenwood

  “No,” Ben says. “No. We have to save Dad. This isn’t his fault. I know it’s not. Mom told me. Mom told me!” He might start disassociating again. Or getting violent and angry. Which might be cathartic for me, to see him destroy this model house.

  Pete heads downstairs. Roscoe tugs, so Ben follows. I follow, too. I feel that we’ve been defeated. Maybe this was the plan, to defeat us. Maybe Pete’s disclosures and promises were just subterfuge, for what? It’s not like we were inches away from finding Dad before. We’ve been defeated from the beginning. Even if we’d known what the J-File was that first night, back at the Postal Museum, when my cell phone still worked and the kidnappers were getting in touch with me, what?

  We get back down to the first floor. I wish I knew what to do next.

  I walk to the back window in the dining room with the green apples on the table. I reach for an apple to eat. I’m hungry. Starving. It’s fake. Nothing to eat. Nothing is real. Across that lovely river I can see a tiny little shack, nearly hidden underneath the bridge we crossed to get to this town. Looks like a nice place to be a hermit. Seems like there’s smoke coming out of a chimney. Nice day for that. Spring fires are a comfort, a treat.

  I can see someone on the yard by the river, with binoculars. I squint, try to make him out. Can’t see much. Just a dark-haired guy observing the water. Maybe he’s a scientist. Or a fisherman. Or libertarian scientist fisherman. I should learn how to fish. Really be self-sufficient.

  Ben goes to the first-floor bathroom, leaving Roscoe with Pete. The two of them walk to me, by the window. Roscoe still has the bear in his mouth.

  “Cover story for what?” I ask Pete again. I’m staring at his face, hoping to get some clue if I should trust him. If he’s trying to help me or trying to hurt me.

  “My mom isn’t an ordinary assassin,” he begins.

  “Not an ordinary assassin,” I repeat. “That’s like saying, ‘This person is an unusual …’ I don’t know. Psychopath. Monster.” My analogies are failing me. “What is an ‘ordinary assassin,’ Pete?” I make scare quotes with my fingers, trying to regain some pull.

  “You’re not stupid, Zoey,” he says. “We live in Washington. Ordinary assassins work for the Department of Defense, other agencies. They’re assassins by proxy, like the lawyers who give the okay to the CIA so that they can go kill terrorists in, like, Pakistan. Or they’re the actual CIA people who go kill the terrorists in Pakistan. Who do you think, like, does this in the real world?”

  I feel a burning in my cheeks. Embarrassed at my own sheltered world, my own naïveté. The greater DC area is full of assassins. Of course it is! Pete’s mom is one of them. My dad is one of them? But he hates the government! And if it’s all so ordinary, then …

  “What’s not ordinary about your mom?” I ask.

  “She’s involved with a private enterprise. Finds clever people who are bored with regular life,” he says, his face growing harder. “They think they are getting into something easy. Exciting. They may travel to do a job. But if they try to get out—”

  “What?” I say, dreading the answer, needing the answer.

  “I told you, Zoey,” Pete says. “The P.F.s are mostly widowers.”

  “Like my dad,” I say. I hate my dad. I hate him more than I’ve ever hated anything. Even lacrosse, and I really hate lacrosse. I hate everything. I hate everything.

  “I guess that’s that then,” I say. “I guess let’s just get Ben to the hospital, so, you know, he won’t lose his arm. I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but can I borrow money to pay for it? After that we’ll get out of your life. I promise.”

  I’m beginning to concoct plans for post-all-of-this. Ben and I and Roscoe will maybe go back to Rhode Island. Hopefully Molly made it back home. Hopefully this will all be over, the P.F.s trying to kill us, Pete and people like him introducing me to feelings and worlds and confusions that I can’t really do anything with or about. I’ll resume my martial arts training. No, screw that; I’ll take up guns. Maybe I can take a gun class at a local range, I think it’s called. So in case this isn’t over, I’ll be prepared to answer the question: Is Mrs. Severy going to kill me and Ben?

  “Zoey, don’t,” Pete says. He puts his hand on my hand again. He leans in, then leans back. He’s crying. “Please don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” I say coldly.

  “Don’t blame me,” he says.

  “I don’t blame you,” I say. The truth, is I don’t blame anyone at this point except Dad.

  “I wish I knew where else to look,” Pete says.

  “Did we check the basement?” Ben asks. He’s out of the bathroom. I have no doubt he’s left behind biological samples of many varieties. It’s not only gross, but it’ll be proof we were here, if that comes to matter. Which it may or may not. We rushed here only to find nothing, no evidence of humanity, no one on our tail. No Dad. Just a forgotten stuffed animal.

  “Not yet,” Pete says. He walks us through the open first floor, past the severe-looking suede couch, the glass coffee table with sharp edges that I think someone who has any use for the upstairs crib probably should not responsibly own. There’s a door I’d taken as leading to a closet that he now opens. He reaches in, like he’s looking for a light switch. Then there’s light.

  Oh, gahd. Is Dad in the basement of this cold, severe, perfect model home, here in this town with a river and good pie? Pete starts walking down the stairs. I start racing after him, then stop when I have this thought: I could push him. Push him down, then run down the stairs myself, see if Dad is there, if he is, then rescue him. Pete seems to be out of ideas anyway, if he ever had any that were useful to our cause. It would be easy to do.

  But I don’t. I follow him to the bottom of the stairs, into the small basement. Which is empty, it looks, on first glance. A washer and dryer, another small bathroom with just another clean toilet and sink in it, and nothing else. I stand in the middle of the room. Roscoe and my brother stay upstairs, looking down at us. Roscoe’s making whimpering noises. My brother just keeps muttering about Norman Mailer levitating the Pentagon. Pete walks along the walls of the room. Bends down. Picks something up. Holds it up to the light.

  “Do you recognize this?” he asks me.

  I do. It’s Dad’s cell phone. Stubborn Dad, who wouldn’t upgrade because “planned obsolescence is a travesty and a conspiracy and I’m not falling for that bullshit of having to buy a new device every six months just because Apple computers wants to make more money.”

  The phone never worked well, even when it was new. Now it doesn’t work at all; I take it in my hand, push buttons. It’s dead. Dad was here, this probably means. Oh, Dad, please don’t be like the phone. Please, Dad, don’t be discarded and inert. Dead.

  “Where is he?” I ask. “Where is my dad? Pete, where is he? He was here. This is his phone. Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know,” Pete says. “I don’t know. I thought he was here. The only houses I know my mom uses for business are this one and the house in Georgetown.”

  The house in Georgetown. The house where we went after that party, with my brother, with the gun. When Pete and P.F. pretended not to know each other.

  “You knew P.F. already that night,” I say.

  “Yes,” Pete says. “I knew him already. I know some of my mother’s associates. The most loyal ones.”

  “Most loyal,” I say. I’m crushed. I’m devastated. By everything. But we’re not done yet, because Dad isn’t here, and either Pete has been lying about thinking that he might be here, or Pete really doesn’t know where he is. And either way, I’m in rough shape; hopefully my dad isn’t in dead shape.

  We go back upstairs, find Ben by the window looking out over the river. My brain is racing. My heart is racing. Dad was HERE. In Pete’s mom’s model home. His cell phone is still here. Is he still alive? If so, where is he? If he’s dead, where is he? Are they, whoever they are, still after the J-File? Is it still with Molly? Is Molly okay? Where is Dad? How
can I find him? What has he done?

  “That house is on fire,” Ben says, pointing at the shack.

  The shack is indeed in flames. This isn’t smoke coming out of a smokestack. Black smoke rises in a vertical plume. Angry orange licks at the roof. The man with the binoculars is gone.

  I have a terrible feeling, but I also have a feeling of finally fixing on something that might get me to the end of all this. It might not be the end that I’ve hoped for, when I’ve even had the temerity to hope for anything other than making it through another day without seeing a cigarette in my toilet, without any family member dying or being kidnapped. Or losing an arm.

  “No wonder she chose this house,” Pete says, almost to himself.

  He’s out the door before I am.

  WHEN THERE’S SMOKE

  Chapter Eighteen

  The car is in front of the house, away from the river, across which the shack is on fire. I have a terrible feeling that my terrible father is inside that house.

  “You guys drive. I’m going to swim across,” I tell Pete and Ben and Roscoe.

  “Swim?” Pete says.

  “I don’t think there’s time to get there by car,” I say. I’m in okay shape. I’m reasonably fit. I’ve got a lot of adrenaline running through me.

  “I think there’s a dinghy you can use,” Pete says. Which sounds better than swimming.

  When I turn to leave them, to go make my way across, to try to save my father, if he’s there in the burning house, if he can be saved, if he even should be saved, I hesitate. What if Pete is not our friend? What if he is still under the spell of his mother? Always was. My brother holds the J-File in his head. To the extent anyone wants the J-File destroyed, killing my brother would be an obvious move. To the extent anyone wants to know what’s in the J-File, stealing my brother and making him write it out for them is also an obvious move.

  “Trust me,” Pete says to me, repeating the same line I’ve heard so many times over the last days, from people who have turned out to be affiliated with murderers. It turns out I’m affiliated with a murderer, too, and he may be dying in a burning house across the river.

  “Be safe,” I say, before dashing away, down some gravel-covered steps until I reach a small, new-looking dock on the river’s edge.

  There’s an orange, floating blow-up watercraft there with oars and a little motor hanging off the back. I look at it with curiosity and urgency, being unfamiliar with boats and motors, wondering if I need a key to get it started, how the oars are involved, etc. Finally, after awkwardly entering the blow-up boat, I see a cord hanging off the motor and tug it; I’ve seen other people, like people mowing lawns, tug on cords attached to motors, with the result of the motor revving up. After a few pulls, this one gets going, too, at which point I determine that I don’t know how to steer this orange vehicle and that I am tied up to the dock.

  I get the boat untied fairly quickly, which is when not being able to steer becomes more of a problem. I bump along the wrong way and into the dock; this I bump off of, propelling me the wrong way again, with some terrible black exhaust billowing up into my nose. And as this rather fraught excitement is progressing, I’m also getting sopping wet from this brown river and watching the house across the way burn, but not to the ground. It’s happening slowly. I see that the shack is partially made of stone; the roof is on fire and causing an alarming amount of smoke, but the bottom seems to be holding, at least for now. Oh, please, please let it hold. Let Dad be in that bottom part, so I can kill him myself, assuming he’s there. It’s possible that, should I ever manage to get this goddamn boat across the river, I am going to come across nothing but a hermit with faulty wiring. And my brother and Pete will be departed to places unknown.

  Keep yourself together, Zoey, I tell myself, myself being Zoey. I play with the stick-type thing coming off the motor until by some miracle it starts going in the direction I want it to go in, which is across this murky body of water and toward the burning house.

  It takes minutes to cross the river, I think. Tense minutes during which I am dive-bombed by several menacing birds, catch wind of my own stink when the wind blows the wrong way, and watch as the house grows more aflame. The boat putters and sputters. This isn’t a zippy and sleek cigarette boat out of a movie. This is the kind of lumpy, lumbering boat an inept dummy would be stuck with in real life.

  But I progress. Inch forward. Then get stuck. The river is so shallow that the boat seems to be caught on a rock. SHIT. I jump up and down, trying to wriggle free, which manages to make the dinghy more unsteady, and me more wet, and accomplishes nothing productive. SHIT SHIT SHIT. I guess I will be swimming after all.

  Jump out of the dinghy. Realize it’s still sputtering and stuck. Try for a moment to shut it off; remember that time is really short here and decide to let it burn itself out of gas. Screw the environment; more important things to worry about right now. Turns out I don’t have to swim to shore. I’m walking to shore. The water only goes up to my knees. Jesus, I should have just walked from the beginning, could have avoided this whole ding dong dinghy mishap.

  Birds are back to flying alarmingly close to my head as I’m slugging through the last few feet of river. I’m shouting at them, “Go away!” then think, maybe don’t shout right now, Zoey, maybe try to keep the tiniest element of surprise here. Then again, this is not Normandy. I’m hardly staging a surprise storming of the beach. I am pretty out there and in the open, coming ashore to this burning house to try to save the murderous Dad, and why why why why why why why why why any of this, I think for a moment, before I reach ground.

  The grounding is both literal and metaphorical. There’s no dock on this side of the river, just a rocky, muddy patch before the grass, before the shack. My stupid shoes slip off as I’m hiking up to the house. I try to put them back on. They fall off again, I leave them in the mud, start to run, hardly noticing the rocks embedding themselves into my feet.

  I reach the shack; it’s farther from the river than I’d thought. It’s dark, no lights on that I can see. The windows are dusty, coated with a thick dirt. Under other circumstances I could see Dad liking this place, saying it has “character,” Mom saying that he’s a character, Ben saying that he feels like a character in a movie sometimes, asking if that’s normal. It is now, Benny, I think to myself, as I make my way around, looking for an entrance, feeling some embers drop on me, glad that I’m all wet so hopefully I won’t burn to death. Hopefully none of us will burn to death.

  The front door is, predictably, in front. And locked. I jiggle the handle several times to see if maybe the door is only just reluctant to open, as opposed to being determined. It’s determined. Feeling pressure to act from the heat of the fire, I take the gun from my pocket, hold it up to the door, and shoot. The kickback takes my breath away. The bullet goes through the door. No one screams. Apparently I haven’t killed anyone, Dad or a hermit, on the other side. But the bullet isn’t a key; the door still doesn’t open.

  “Dad?” I yell. “Dad?” Nothing.

  I abandon my plan to shoot my way into the cabin; frankly, I don’t even know if I have more bullets left in this gun. Even if I knew how many bullets I started with, I haven’t been counting how many bullets it’s expelled so far, but it seems like a lot, and I don’t think it’s got an endless supply, like an extremely lethal clown car. So now I move over to the dusty window.

  I peer in, hoping to catch a glimpse of what’s inside the cabin. Can’t see anything. The window’s small and so dirty I can’t even tell if there’s a curtain blocking my view. Okay, okay, act fast, not much time. I take off the army coat and wrap my fist with it, then punch the window. It does not crack; my fist does. Goddamn that hurts. I punch it again and cry out. I think I’ve broken the bones in my hand. This glass is tougher than I’d have expected. Tougher than I am. I try with my elbow this time and just feel a shooting pain up my arm, but the glass doesn’t give.

  “Dad? Dad!” I’m still crying out, having full
y given up on the element of mystery, surprise. “Dad! I’m here, Dad! I’m here!”

  He might be upstairs, already dead of smoke inhalation or flame, or he might not be here in this cabin at all. “Dad!” I shout again. “Dad! Dad!”

  I stare helplessly at the impenetrable cabin. How will I get in? How will I get in? I point the gun at the window and, hoping there is a bullet and hoping the glass isn’t bulletproof and hoping that, if it’s not bulletproof, it won’t penetrate only to hit my father—because wouldn’t that be the worst irony; I’m shooting my way in to save him, and I kill the old bastard—and, Dayenu, Dayenu, Dad, there is a bullet, and it pierces the glass.

  Holding my eye to the hole, I don’t see a dead father right inside. I don’t see much of anything right inside. I think I can make out a brown couch, a brown table. I elbow the window again, near the bullethole. It feels like it’s giving. Please, window, give, I’m thinking, elbowing it again, the pain tremendous, the need to get inside more tremendous.

  I hear a car on gravel. I look up. It’s the Lincoln. Pete at the wheel. He did not steal my brother. Dayenu again. Dayenu for so much. Yes, I’m using the word wrong if you’re talking in the technical sense, but this is how Dad uses it, used it, and I’m his daughter, and Dayenu Dayenu Dayenu.

  “Get out of the car,” I say, rushing to Pete’s window. “Ben, get out. Take Roscoe.”

  “Why?” Pete asks. He looks shocked, looking at my hand. I look down. It’s bleeding, looks twisted.

  “I need the car,” I say. “Trust me.”

  Pete gets out, leaves the key in the ignition. Ben picks up his book and Roscoe’s leash, and gets out, too.

  “Go stand over there,” I shout, pointing at a tree toward the road.

  I get into the driver’s seat. Move the seat forward, then put on my seatbelt. No time to think about this being a bad idea, or a failing idea. I adjust the steering wheel slightly and hit the gas.