I’m about a foot from the window, about to reach out to it to try to open it from the outside, like some sort of cat burglar, when I suddenly see Molly’s face in the window, looking right at me.
She screams. I scream. I almost fall from the branch but hold on and don’t fall. Molly holds up her index finger, looking shaken and stern. She leaves the window. I keep holding on. She comes back, opens the window.
“Where did you go?” I ask.
“I had to turn off the alarm,” she says.
“When did you get an alarm?” I ask.
“This winter,” she says. She doesn’t say, “After your mother was killed and everyone freaked out.” I assume, narcissistically, but also kind of really reasonably, that that was the impetus. She does say, “What are you doing here on a tree outside my window, you psycho?”
I start to defend myself. Then I start to laugh. Then I start to talk. “I wanted to apologize,” I say. “Please take me back.” I reach out my arms, then think concussion, and grab the tree again, clutching myself to it. “Why were you at the window?” I ask. “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“You didn’t,” she says. “I was just having a bad dream. I get insomnia and then nightmares. This one … it was about your mom, actually. She was telling me that you were in trouble.”
“Holy lord,” I’m about to say, when I hear an extremely distressing, extremely scary bang! like a car is backfiring. But I think, It’s just a car backfiring.
But then there’s another bang!, then another.
These bangs are feeling awfully personal. I hear something hit the tree, thwap, a violent moment that shakes the tree a little bit. It’s a violent scary moment. Another bang. I grab the branch even tighter, hugging it to me. Wishing myself back to somewhere safe, but there is nowhere safe. There is nowhere safe. Bits of bark crumble. I can still feel so many bugs on me.
“Get down!” I shout at Molly. “Get away from the window and get down!”
Looking terrified, quite understandably, she moves back from the window. I can picture her going to the far side of the bed. Crouching next to it. I hope she’s crouching next to it.
My heart is pounding. My mind is racing. Am I close enough to the window to get inside? I don’t think I am. Not without some acrobatic maneuvering that would leave me quite vulnerable. Can I stay where I am? The bullets whizzing around me would suggest not. How many bullets does this shooter have? And why are they directed at me? A plan, Zoey. Think. Think.
I start climbing back down the tree. The shooter can’t see me very well. I’m sure of it. I’m happy for the dark jeans. I’m glad for the camouflaging qualities of my dad’s beat-up army jacket I stole from him a couple of years ago. (No, Dad wasn’t ever in the Army. He got it from Gap. I think he did. That’s the story he’s always told, anyway.) This is not a graceful egress from the tree. But I get down, and I get down without being shot.
The bang-bang-bangs stop for a second. Christ. I try to suck in my stomach and hide behind the tree. I can’t tell if this is effective, but since I’m not being shot, it must be at least moderately effective. I should probably also try to lose five or six pounds so that I don’t have to suck in my stomach like this next time I need cover from arboreal sources. I can hear my mom’s voice in my head saying that it’s unseemly to be concerned about five pounds. She thought I was vain whenever I worried about my weight. This from a woman who claimed to be thirty-seven three years in a row; was still making that claim up until the day she was killed.
Then I hear footsteps. Crunches on gravel. Padding on the grass. I wonder if Molly has called the police. I wonder if she has, if that is a good idea or a bad idea. I wonder if it was Mom’s ghost that came to her in the dream, or if this was just the coincidental moment her subconscious was telling her to forgive me. I hear a man’s voice say “OW!”
I peer out from behind the tree and see a lumpy-looking man lifting up his left foot, which has been injured in some way; maybe stubbed on a tree root, in which case, thanks, trees. He’s got the gun clutched in his right hand. I remember that Molly’s yard is littered with rocks. I have an idea. It might even be a decent idea.
Reaching out, I grab the shovel. Then I look around me for a rock, a good-sized one, but not too big. I reach down with the shovel and scoop up the rock. C’mon, Zoey, I think. You can do this. You can. My heart is pounding, but I also feel like I’m slipping into warrior mode or something. In principle, this should work. My heart pounding, my arms not quite up to the task, I use the shovel like a lacrosse stick, like a catapult, to heave the rock at the man, who I still can’t quite make out in the dark.
The rock goes near the man, I think; it at least goes somewhere within his ambit, I surmise, because I can see him stop as he seems to be examining his environs, to see what has just happened. And while he is distracted, I look for another rock but then have a different idea, and run straight to him, shouting “aaaaaarrrrrrrr” as I do it, and finally thwack him on the left side of the head with the shovel. The man lets out an “umph” and looks at me, then rather melts to the ground.
Finally, I can see his face. And what I can see is it’s the lobbyist. It’s the goddamn lobbyist. The one from the Postal Museum. From the night this all began. Now he’s splayed out on Molly’s lawn, wearing more wrinkled khakis and a navy blue windbreaker. Why? Why? Why?
I bend down, and, like before, I take his gun. This one looks different. It’s sleeker, somehow. A little lighter than the other one. I put it into the pocket of my Gap army coat, then, again like before, feel around in his pockets. He’s lying on his right side. He hasn’t lost weight; I still can’t reach into the pockets that he’s fallen on top of. But in the left pocket, he’s got a wallet, which I open. There’s his driver’s license at the front, and there’s his name: Peter Francis Greenawalt.
HI HO
Chapter Fourteen
I’m standing over this man, this P.F., holding a gun, when Molly comes dashing out of the house.
“WHAT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD IS GOING ON?” she shouts.
“Molly, be quiet,” I say. When I see the startled expression on her face, I realize that I am pointing the gun on her. “Help me move him,” I say.
“To where?” she asks. It’s a good question.
“Is your sister still in the basement?” I ask.
“Are you out of your mind?” Molly says back. “You are, aren’t you. You are out of your mind. I should have known you’d go crazy for real eventually when I let you convince me to break into that stable and go horseback riding in the middle of the night that time.”
“That was your idea!” I say. It was, too! Molly was the one taking horseback riding lessons, not me, when we were fourteen. She was the one who knew how to put saddles on horses and how to get them to go where you wanted them to and whatnot. But this is no time for dickering over ancient history. This is the time for dragging a big, fat, passed-out lobbyist … somewhere.
“How about the trunk of the car?” I suggest, nodding toward Pete’s Volvo.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” says Molly. She bends down and tries to lift P.F.—yes, this is P.F., another P.F. or the P.F., or who knows—by the armpits. It doesn’t work. Molly’s huffing a little. “He’s fat,” she says. I now realize Molly’s had an underlying anti-fat bias as long as I’ve known her. I’m feeling less pro-Molly the longer this whole thing is happening.
“Can you try again?” I ask. “Can we try dragging?”
Molly bends down again. She tries to pull him from under the armpits while I shove against his feet, holding the gun in my hand as I’m doing it and pretty durn afraid I might accidentally pull the trigger. You can guess how successfully this goes.
“I’m going to call the police,” Molly says. She’s out of breath, bent over with her hands on her knees.
“Please don’t,” I say.
“Why?” Molly says.
“It’s a long story,” I say. I’m huffing, too. I wave my hand with the gun
in it around in a careless gesture meant to indicate, “You know, too many details to get into right now.” Then I realize I’m carelessly waving a gun around in the air. I put my gun hand down. I’m coming down from the adrenaline high. I’m starting to realize where I am again, who I’m with, what I’m doing here.
“Things are awful, Molly,” I say, slipping the gun into my jacket pocket. “You won’t be able to get your mind around it.”
“I bet I could,” Molly says. “It’s been no picnic around here, either.”
We end up leaving P.F. on the lawn. We don’t know what else to do with him, since we can’t carry him and we can’t call the police. I drive the Volvo back to Aunt Lisa and Uncle Henry’s house. Molly stays behind. She’s going back to sleep, she says, if she can, with this fat guy passed out on the front lawn. Hopefully, she says, he’ll have picked himself up and gone home, or gone somewhere, by the time her parents wake up.
“This is so so profoundly messed up, Zoey,” she says. “And I’m saying this as someone who was recently kicked out of high school for buying some other kid’s Adderall.”
“I know,” I say. Then, “Wait, you got thrown out of school?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “Ugh. I don’t want to talk about it. I tried to tell Donald about it and he just said that he couldn’t deal with me having more problems.”
“You didn’t tell me,” I say. I feel hurt. Molly didn’t tell me. “Why were you buying another kid’s Adderall?”
“For the SATs,” she says. “My doctor said she wouldn’t give me any more.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says again. “Yeah. It’s time for things to stop being so stupidly messed up. Hey, does your brother have any Ritalin?”
“He went off his meds a while ago,” I say. He did, too. Just decided one day about a year ago that he didn’t need/want them anymore. Had developed enough self-coping techniques and was focused enough without needing to resort, in his words, “to the machinations of Big Pharmaceutical and its disturbing crony relationship with the government and all so-called mental health doctors.” I think he got that exact phrasing from Dad.
I also think that probably Ben was a little smarter, now that I think of it, when he was taking his Ritalin. I feel like the old, medicated Ben probably would have been more useful during this whole “Dad kidnapped” stage of things. He may have seen useful connections and patterns I’m not seeing. Like, say, figuring out that there is more than one P.F. Greenawalt. And why. And what to make of it. Like if we’re being played by the one in Georgetown. And why this one here is trying to kill us. (Seriously, why is he trying to kill us????)
But no. At least he showed “Big Pharmaceutical” a thing or two, right?
So while I don’t have access to the pills, or my brother’s now only sometimes super-powerful weirdo brain, or any answers AT ALL about what in the HELL is going on with these P.F.s, the friendly one, supposedly, who I do not trust one iota, and the most definitely unfriendly one now passed out on the lawn, who I trust even less, I do share the sense it’s time for things to get better.
When I get back to the house, I’m ready to go wake up Pete and Ben to explain to them that we aren’t safe here in Rhode Island, that Aunt Lisa and Uncle Henry are in danger with us here, too, I think—I think?—but I find them already up, packed, and waiting for me to get home, ready with the same lecture.
I’m so tired. I’m so scared. I’m repacking my bag—how did my jeans and tops and lotions and other things explode around the room before we’d even spent one night at the house?—when I hear another alarming sound. It’s a crash. A house-shaking crash. An earth-crashing shake. A nerve-demolisher.
I run to look out the window and can’t see what’s happened, but I can see lights going on in the neighbors’ houses. So this isn’t just in my head. Which is a relief.
I rush to the front door. Pete and Ben are already there. Aunt Lisa and Uncle Henry are coming down the stairs. This woke them up, too. Look outside, and holy shit. Holy shit. It would appear that something big and powerful has crashed through Pete’s car. It’s smoking up through the trunk.
We go outside to inspect. Indeed, there is a big smoking hole in the car. The neighbors are coming outside. Jesus. What if P.F. had been in there? I mean, what if he had?
“Meteorite,” says Ben. He picks up a hunk of rock from the road. “Warm,” he says. “This has been traveling for millions of years. And now it’s here.”
“It hit my car,” says Pete. “I can’t drive this. I can’t drive this!” He looks around, as if he might have forgotten that he had another car there that we could use.
“We have to leave,” I say. I can hear the anxiety in my voice. I want to hug Ben close, but that’ll make it worse for him. I want to hug Pete, but I don’t know if we have that kind of relationship.
“I know,” Pete says. He sounds angry. He sounds so tired. “I know. This ends today. I just don’t know how we’re going to get back.”
Just then, Molly pulls into the driveway, in that old Toyota her sister’s ex-boyfriend gave her back in high school.
“Your mother,” she says, getting out of the car. “She won’t leave me alone.”
We go back inside the house, then walk out the back door. Uncle Henry is standing in the backyard, dazedly holding a smooshed tomato. Aunt Lisa is checking on the alpacas. From the smoke coming off their shed, their prospects are not fabulous. The house seems okay. The turret wasn’t knocked off or anything.
I walk back to the alpaca shed. The two alpacas are lying dead in the shed, with blood on their llama-like, grey furry heads. There are two holes in the roof of the shed.
“Jesus Christ,” I say.
Aunt Linda shoots me a look. She’s stroking the heads of one of the alpacas, the grey one, who’s lying on the hay as if he’s napping. Then she shoots Uncle Henry, who’s also come in, a somewhat different look.
“They were insured, right?” she asks. He nods. She appears to suppress a smile. I can almost hear her brain devising artisanal alpaca sausage recipes. Maybe she’ll sell them at farmers markets or something.
I hug my aunt. “We have to go,” I say.
“Stay, I’ll cook you some breakfast,” she says. I want to. I want to stay. I’m even a little curious what those gorgeous camelids taste like. Did they have a moment of insight, when the meteoroid hit them in the heads? Did they suddenly know they were going to die? Or know why they were about to die? Or why they lived? (To produce yarn and babies for yuppies who didn’t understand the notion of an alpaca bubble, is why they lived, so far as I can tell. But what did their own lives mean to them?)
I hope it wasn’t scary for them, when the meteorite came through the roof. I wonder if they sensed danger was coming. They might have better-developed instincts like that than I’ve got. Hell, it’s turning out that a tomato might have better-developed instincts.
I suck at this, it’s turning out. I suck at figuring out what is wrong and what to do about it. But I can at least try to follow the plan, which changes every fifteen minutes or thereabouts for reasons that don’t seem entirely, sometimes even at all, obvious to me.
“We can’t,” I say, because this time I can see why we’re committed to leaving, having been recently shot at by P.F.—who the hell is P.F.???? Who are any of the P.F.s????—and all. I can see Pete making his way to the shed, stepping around the bits of meteorite that are now scattered in holes around the yard. I’m no economist, but it seems obvious this won’t be good for property values.
We go back out front. Pete and Ben have already put their bags into Molly’s car; Ben’s already settled into the cramped, filthy backseat of the car. Pete is in the driver’s seat. Molly in the passenger’s seat. She looks awful. Of course, she did just see me with a gun, help me try to drag a passed-out homicidal lobbyist across her front lawn, and find herself haunted, I guess, by good old dead Mom.
“What?” she says, when she notices me noticing her. �
�Stop looking at me like that.”
I run upstairs, grab my bag, bring it down, toss it in the trunk. Molly has to get out to let me in. She and Pete are already Mom and Dad. I wonder if she’d sleep with him to make up for Donald. I get in the car, and then we go.
Ben has studied the maps—the road maps, the traffic maps, the traffic camera maps, and several other relevant maps—and devised the quickest possible route. Perhaps he’s still able to see patterns after all, even without the drugs. In which case, why isn’t he seeing kidnapping patterns, not just traffic patterns? Anyway, it’ll take five hours, they claim.
“To where?” I ask.
Ben rattles off an address. Something something something Chain Bridge Road, McLean, Virginia. He even gives me the zip code.
“What is that the address for?” I ask.
Ben shrugs. He’s still not interested in personal details. Never was. You’d try to tell him about your day, and he’d glaze over. You could see him working out math problems in his head as you were complaining about, say, lacrosse practice. One got used to not sharing one’s life with this robot brother. Figures he’d calculate how to get someplace we are fleeing to or racing toward or doing something involving an adverb and a verb regarding without him even asking what the place is or why we’re going there.
“What is this place, Pete?” I ask anxiously, which is my most frequently applicable personal adverb.
Pete just keeps driving. Ben turns on his reading light and goes back to reading some sort of economics treatise. The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek, I see when he shows me the cover. The definitive edition. It’s libertarians’ favorite book, next to Atlas Shrugged. Dad tried to get me to read it when I was younger. Because younger kids should definitely be reading libertarian economics treatises. But there’s my brother. There’s my brother. I guess this is his way of missing Dad. Or being, like, a genius. But if he’s such a genius, why doesn’t he know how to get us out of this?
Save the Enemy Page 14