“Please don’t make me,” I say.
Pete says nothing. His face grows more blank. I imagine him leaving. I imagine me and Ben trying to manage this, this, alone. In even more danger. Pete is the closest thing I have to a friend here. I have no one. I have to try.
“This is going to sound crazy,” I begin, watching Pete’s face warily. His eyes brighten, just a touch. He wants me to go on. He has no idea what he’s in store for.
“I should start by saying that I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say, trying again. This story needs too much preamble. This lunatic story. This dangerous, confusing, lunatic story.
“I do,” Pete says.
“You do?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
The old me would have started calling him an imbecile, especially if Dad were around to hear and approve. The new me is just grateful.
“Mom’s ghost has been visiting Ben at night,” I say very quickly. Then I swallow and speak a little slower. “He says she has. He says she’s been telling him these initials and dates, and telling him to write them down in a notebook. A ‘J-File’ or something, which it turns out is … I don’t know. Valuable or something.”
“To who?” Pete asks. “Like on eBay?”
I hesitate. I thought the ghost part of this conversation was going to be tough, but now that I’ve gotten to what comes next, I realize that talking about the mysterious and dubious circumstances relating to how the J-File has come into existence was comparatively easy.
“Dad’s not just on a trip,” I say. “He’s been kidnapped. The kidnappers want the notebook, the J-File.”
I take another breath. I can get away with not telling Pete this last part. But I want to tell him. I want to have someone to confide in. I wish Molly were here and that we were still friends, but she’s not here and he is.
“It’s worse than you think,” I say. “I think Mom is telling Ben about people who Dad has killed. I think that’s what’s in the notebook. Records of Dad’s … assassinations. It’s so awful. Pete, it’s so awful. I didn’t know this is who my dad was. Who he is.”
“Why aren’t you giving them the notebook, then?” Pete asks. “Are you not sure if you actually want your dad back now?”
“No,” I say quickly. “I want Dad back.” I hadn’t been sure until I said it, actually. But now I’m sure. I want Dad back. Assassin Dad. I’d laugh at the idea of it, if everything in the universe were back to how things were in December. Or even four days ago.
“That guy whose house we went to, who was here the other day,” I begin.
“P.F.,” Pete says. A look that I can’t quite place comes over his face. Then it’s gone.
“He’s some kind of Political Consultant. He said that the kidnappers will kill Dad even if they get the notebook. He said that he has law enforcement sources who want the notebook, to help bring down the syndicate that Dad is involved with.” Jesus Christ and a thousand oy veys, these are the words coming out of my mouth, describing the state of things in Zoey’s world.
“Law enforcement sources?” Pete says. “Then why are we going to Rhode Island?”
He said we. We’re going to Rhode Island. We. Maybe he’s going to help, even if my dad is a kidnapped killer and my mom is a ghost and my brother is … where is my brother, anyway? I’m not worried; he’s probably upstairs, inventing a new language, or reading up on Star Wars memorabilia prices, or sleeping, or sitting on the floor tying then untying knots in a piece of string.
“P.F. said that his law enforcement sources need the full J-File by the end of the week. P.F. thought we should get out of town while Ben gets the rest of the stuff from Mom,” I say. I pause. There were, like, twenty or so entries in the notebook already. Sweet Ayn Rand, my dad has been an active assassin. The thought of this fills me with dread, and then of all twisted things, I feel a little bit of pride. My fuckup dad is a good killer, apparently.
I start to laugh even though I really couldn’t for the life of me say what’s funny. Pete starts to laugh, too. I have even less of an idea what he’s laughing about, but boy howdy this is a better reaction than it could have been.
“So we’re going to Rhode Island, then,” Pete says. “Better go get ready.”
“You’re really going to come?” I say. “You can take off school?”
“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “I’ve never been to Rhode Island.”
I realize that I’ll need some way to get out of school. I lack Pete’s casual confidence that I can just take off. I break back into the computer and send the headmaster an email from Dad’s account:
“Dear Mr. Standiford,” I begin, before pausing. Would Dad call the headmaster Mr. Standiford? Would he call him by his first name? What is his first name? I read various online etiquette websites for guidance. None addresses the issue of forging an email from one’s kidnapped father to the headmaster.
I try again: “Hello there, We’re having a bit of a family emergency. My daughter, Zoey, and son, Ben, will be staying with relatives in Rhode Island for the next couple of days. Please excuse their absence. They should be back by …”
I don’t know how to end this sentence. I don’t know when we should be back by. P.F. and his contacts (or friends? or enemies?) demand fast results. And it’s impossible to say when Ben and ghost Mom will be done with their work.
“They should be back by early next week. I will contact you as soon as I can if their Rhode Island jaunt is to be extended.”
And why not?
“I would be most grateful if you would ask their teachers to be gentle in grading, given the multiple family difficulties my children have encountered in recent months.
“Sincerely,
“Jacob Trask”
I pack a small suitcase of clothes for myself, which turns into a large suitcase as I discover that I don’t know what to bring on this trip. Some jeans, but what if they’re not the right jeans, some skirts in case we go somewhere fancy, but what if I don’t feel like wearing them, some T-shirts, but I hate all my T-shirts, etc. In all that, I almost forget to pack undies, but then I remember to pack them, and as I’m doing it I notice that they are mostly of the “three for $5 from Target” variety, and I wonder if a girl my age should have nicer undies. I then oversee Ben’s considerably simpler packing of a small suitcase of disgusting T-shirts, polyester pants, and books about Brazil’s exploding economy for himself.
And then we go.
The drive is supposed to take about eight hours. We take some back roads, stop at a crab shack in Maryland that Pete says he’s heard about.
“I can’t wait to try this with you,” he says. He sounds a little nervous, and a little excited. “I hope you like the crabs.”
Pete and I pound crabs with hammers, eat vinegary coleslaw. I can’t get much meat from the crabs but find smashing them with hammers to be rather cathartic. My brother, naturally, chimes in to say it’s “barbaric” to eat like this. He picks at a grilled cheese the cook agrees to whip up for him. I eat half his grilled cheese because all the crab-pounding has me a little bit hungry.
Pete offers to pay for dinner, but I whip out some of P.F.’s cash.
Ben says, “You should let Pete pay.”
Pete puts his hand on my arm and says, “Let me pay,” but then his phone rings. As he’s looking at it, not answering it, I lay down cash. I want to use my agency while I have it.
We get back in the car. My brother sits in the backseat. I monitor as he takes off his coat, ready to jump in and remind him to buckle his seatbelt, during which time I also have the opportunity to revisit his outfit: ratty brown dress slacks (Dad’s word, but priceless) and a T-shirt from some corporate event Dad once participated in that raised money for charity, even though my dad does not believe in charity (but he had to participate in these events, back when he had a job as a corporate auditor even if said job was really just a front for a very nefarious other job killing people that is looking like it may result in me and my brother
being orphaned).
No, but I take it back. Dad believes that if you want to help someone—to be charitable—you should. He says that charity is “not a moral virtue” and that one should not feel obligated to help others. Which raises the question: What the hell are we doing on this cockamamie scheme to rescue him from kidnappers when anyone looking at this situation can see he put himself in this situation, and we are only endangering ourselves trying to get him back? I can already hear his answer. He’d say it in that “I know everything” tone of voice. A tone that my brother has inherited well. He’d say that just because he cannot demand that we help him doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. We should if it’s what we want to do. I’m pretty sure it’s what we want to do.
When I turn back around to face forward, I kick off my shoes and put my feet on the dashboard. I wouldn’t have done that before, but it feels like a wall has come down between me and Pete now. I’ve just seen him as a compellingly attractive, useful body before. But I feel like he is becoming more than that to me. I feel like I am seeing him as a real person for the first time, if that makes any sense. I’m ready for him to see my hole-y socks now.
He tells me about his dad dying, drowning while on vacation in South Carolina, when he was eleven. They were in the water together. His dad got caught in an undertow. There was nothing that could be done. It was lucky he was a couple of feet away, he says, not stuck in that same current.
I ask him if it was hard growing up without a dad.
“My mom works a lot,” he says. “So Abby and I got sent to boarding school early on. But that’s where I met my first guitar teacher, Mr. Brown, in seventh grade. Life is mysterious, young Zoey.”
I tell him about my mom. My beautiful, infuriating, insouciantly dressed dead mom—and about my missing dog, and about Molly, my best friend who no longer speaks to me. His hand rests on top of mine while we drive. I stop talking and stare out the window at the nothingness, since it’s dark out, and memories come into my head then leave, just little bits of mental ephemera from a life I don’t have anymore. I don’t feel as terrible as I might.
“What about you, Benny?” Pete asks Ben. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Ben looks up from his book, which he’s been reading quietly in the backseat using a small flashlight. “Maybe an economist,” he says. “Or a journalist.”
This surprises me. I’ve never heard him say he wanted to be a journalist before. I suppose I put Ben in his Ben Box a long time ago. I’ve mostly only paid attention to his leafy green vegetable consumption and his propensity for not looking both ways when he crosses the street and his tendency to clam up and freak out when he’s forced to participate in something that he especially does not like, like conversation with strangers, or the eating of leafy green vegetables. I’ve forgotten that he is also a person who thinks about his own future.
I start drifting off into a nap. Pete turns on the radio, scans the stations. He lands on “Crazy,” by Patsy Cline, which I don’t know why I know, but I do. Pete starts singing along with it. His singing voice is different from his talking voice; it’s got a melancholy to it that I don’t hear when he’s talking. He taps my hand with his finger as he sings, “Crazy, I’m crazy for feeling so lonely. I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so blue.”
His phone rings. I glance at him as he glances at the bright screen, then hits the DECLINE CALL button.
“There’s no such thing as mental illness,” my brother cuts in, “because there is no such thing as the ‘mind,’ per se, only the brain. And we can’t locate these supposed ‘illnesses’ within the brain. Despite hundreds of years of looking for them there. The treatments for mental illness are barbaric. Always have been. And doctors, and politicians, just diagnose people who threaten their world order as mentally ill. They use that diagnosis to lock those people up. Cut their brains up.”
“My sister’s on antidepressants,” says Pete.
Which I also didn’t know. Not that it matters. Almost everyone’s on anti-depressants from what I understand. I’m not, only because I’ve been too lazy to get to someone who could prescribe them for me. And I never wanted my parents to feel badly that I felt badly. And … I don’t know. I just didn’t.
“People should take whatever drugs or other elixirs they find useful,” says my brother. “The mind is a metaphor but the brain is still susceptible to drugs and other forms of relief.”
“I disagree,” Pete says.
My brother chortles. “Don’t tell me you believe in the mind/body divide, still,” he says. “What else, that the world is flat?”
The next song comes on. It’s that song that goes “Workin’ nine to five, what a way to make a living.” Mom loved the movie that song was the theme to. I think that movie was called Nine to Five, too. We watched it on TV one night when we still lived in Rhode Island. The women in the movie were all harassed by their male (and female) coworkers and had suits with big shoulders. Mom said that everyone wore big shoulders in the eighties and that many people were harassed by their coworkers.
“Why?” I’d asked her. She’d laughed. “Why to which?” she’d asked back. Then she probably force-fed me some carrot sticks while ignoring the fact that I wore the same T-shirt every day for a week.
I rest my eyes but can’t sleep. I have a nagging question that keeps me up: “The mind may be just a metaphor, but then why does it hurt so much when I have a headache?”
“It’s your brain that hurts. Your mind is the experience of that brain,” says my brother, like I’m mentally infirm. Which maybe I am because I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
“How?” I say to my brother. “How does seeing Mom’s ghost fit in with the idea that there is no mind?”
“I don’t see the contradiction,” he says, again with the unpleasant tone.
Pete’s still singing, but softer, still tapping my hand with his finger. But he’s leaving the finger on my hand a little longer with each tap. Then he just rests his hand on my hand. I pretend to fall asleep just so that I can keep my eyes closed, savoring the feeling of this unexpected and unusual peace, for the last hour of our drive.
AWFUL AWFUL
Chapter Eleven
We cross the Rhode Island border just after 10 P.M. Drive up Route 95, past where I went to nature camp when I was a kid, past the beach exits, past the 24-hour diner where I worked for a few weeks as a waitress one summer when I was about fifteen, until the owners discovered that I was never going to stop being a terrible waitress and asked me not to come back.
“I can’t wait to show you the beach here,” I say. “Maybe we can to go Newport and see the mansions. And I really want to eat some Del’s lemonade. That’s just frozen lemonade with chunks of lemon in it, but it’s a real Rhode Island speciality. And we’ll go for clam cakes. Those are the best. And get some Awful Awfuls.”
“What are those?” Pete asks.
“Milkshakes,” says Ben. “All they are are milkshakes.”
“You get them from this place called Newport Creamery,” I say. “They only come in chocolate, strawberry, coffee, and vanilla. I think I’ve only ever had chocolate, actually. Who gets strawberry? We used to go to Newport Creamery on Friday nights and get grilled cheese and Awful Awfuls.”
“They’re just milkshakes,” says Ben again from the backseat. “And they’re not even originally from Rhode Island. A New Jersey company had them first. Newport Creamery bought the name when that company went out of business.”
“I can’t wait to try one,” says Pete. “Maybe I’ll get strawberry.” I smile at him. He’s still doing things to my hand with his hand. Nice things. Things that make me feel squishy inside.
I know we’re not on vacation here. But it feels like a respite. I also have this crazy feeling like maybe Molly and I could reconcile while I’m back. She’d have to forgive me if she saw me. We were best friends for almost twelve years, since we met in kindergarten. Our mothers were best friends. Our dads went bike riding eve
ry weekend. If I stop by her house, and she sees me, we’ll be friends again. I know it. Things have to improve, to be improving. I try to psychically connect with her brain, so my brain can ask her brain if my theory has legs. (Needless to say, it doesn’t work.)
Twenty minutes or so later, we get off at the North Kingstown exit, drive along Route 1, and finally pull into Uncle Henry and Aunt Lisa’s funny little “newfangled development” (as Mom put it) in which all the houses, Mom liked to show me, are gigantic and come in one of three models: faux Tudor-meets-Italian castle; faux Victorian-meets-White House; and then a third model that combines all four styles. I can feel myself starting to relax as we turn the corner to their house—it’s the second model, Victorian-meets-White-House, wide with multiple decorative columns and also a spindly turret, all covered in vinyl siding that Mom used to call “tacky” and Dad liked to recommend as “practical.” (I liked the turret, personally, until I learned that it is not a functional turret. What sick architect would put a non-functional turret on a house?)
Concerns about the house’s architectural quirks aside, I’m glad to be here. I’m thinking that at last we’ll have proper adult supervision, people to take responsibility, people to make sure we eat properly, even if we can’t come to a consensus about the house’s exterior. Then I see a police car pulling out of the driveway.
We park on the other side of the street, in front of a neighbor’s house—they’ve got the faux Tudor-meets-Italian-castle style; it’s covered in fake stone and has several gold statues of frolicking naked women and boys on the lawn. Mom had many unkind words about the golden naked boys, back when she was alive.
“What’s going on?” Pete asks. I feel like my heart is going to explode.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“The police were here,” my brother observes. “And now they are leaving.”
“Thanks, Ben,” I say to him as we traverse the flagstones that keep the grass from being trampled, then walk up the portico, flanked by one American flag and one flag with the Boston Red Sox logo on it, to the front door. I ring the bell.
Save the Enemy Page 11