Save the Enemy

Do I believe in ghosts? I didn’t used to.

About six years before my mom was randomly murdered, she said that she believed in “spirituality.” She couldn’t define what that meant. Dad didn’t tell her that she was being stupid. No, he gave her his worst: she was being irrational.

“Spirits are inherently irrational,” Mom replied. She kissed my little brother Ben on the head as he read the
Wall Street Journal
. He was, like, seven at the time and seemed to know more about the Federal Reserve’s goings-on than Dad (or Mom or I) did.

“They’re raising interest rates,” Ben announced. “The economy is probably improving.”

Mom kissed him again, half motherly affection and half showing off. Even then she was the only one who could touch Ben. He would fidget away from Dad and me. Ben and Mom were in their own weird little bubble together sometimes. And still are, as it turns out.

“You’re inherently irrational, Julia,” Dad said. Then he
got all pissy and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich and a mess.

I was always Dad’s good little student, as much as I could be. When he told me that paper money would sink the American economy, I’d repeat this theory back to perfect strangers while they were trying to buy an ice cream. When Dad tried to teach me his own made-up version of jiu-jitsu—yes, Dad’s special nonsense jiu-jitsu, Jesus Christ, I called it jiu-Dadsu for the love of everything—I tried to learn; Dad said that in this day and age a girl should be able to flip a potential enemy onto his back. This girl never quite could, but she surely tried. And it really seemed to irritate Mom that I preferred Dad’s hobbies (flipping enemies, eating sandwiches) to the ones she tried to steer me toward, like group athletics, playing an instrument, or washing my hair. And so, when Dad said that ghosts were irrational and therefore didn’t exist, I took his side against Mom’s.

What’s funny about that? My name means “spiritual life,” if you spell it without the “y,” which is only on there because Mom thought it was cuter that way. Dad likes to tell me that he didn’t know that’s what Zoey, or “Zoe,” meant when he named me. He likes to say that he only knew about a book he liked with that name in the title, and a French nuclear reactor that also shares my name. The first nuclear reactor in France, in fact. Dad is into both books and nuclear power and says it’s a “crying shame” and a “travesty” that the “no-goodnick environmentalists” are standing in the way of human progress.

About a month after Mom was murdered, I woke up desperately sad, realizing I’d never find out what she really thought of the universe’s mysterious and ethereal ways. We’d never argue over the violin or the piano. We’d never share a
private laugh over Dad’s overbearing ridiculousness. I wished,
wish
, that instead of taking the opportunity to be on Dad’s side—to follow him into the kitchen and steal a little bit of his PB&J—I’d stayed with her and Ben.

I’m not sure if Dad’s right about paper money either, for that matter.

The point is, that same day I woke up so sad, it started looking like I would have the chance to know Mom’s beliefs on the afterlife. Better yet, it seemed as if I might glimpse her experience of the afterlife, so long as my little brother asked her the right questions in his dreams. Ben announced at breakfast that he and Mom communicated while he was asleep.

It’s worth mentioning that he made this proclamation in the same dull monotone that he says everything, including his commentary on the economy.

Apparently Mom and Ben have kept up a dialogue since. Either that or my little brother is crazy. I say this like it’s either/or, but I suppose it’s really not. It’s what my dad would say is a “false dichotomy.” It’s probably not fair to suggest that little Ben is crazy. The doctors prefer terms like “autistic spectrum.” Or worse: “Neurodiverse,” as Dad would argue.

Or he would have argued, before he got himself kidnapped.

I’m sitting next to Brian Keegan in English class, trying to make a chair levitate.

“The book said you should try to make it vibrate first,” I say to Brian. “Then, once it’s vibrating, you can lift it off the ground. With your thoughts.” I show him a peek of
You Can Levitate
, a book I found at the new age bookstore up the street from my house.

Brian nods. The chair is motionless.

Kids at The Shenandoah School are a lot more tolerant of almost everything than kids at my old school were. Up until this year (my senior year, no less), I went to a huge public school in Warwick, Rhode Island. You had to be careful to wear the right brand of jeans there. You could not speak openly about your levitation goals. Or else—and, really, this is just conjecture, but I think I’m right—the school’s meanest and prettiest girls would say, very loudly, something along the lines of “How’s your levitating going? Are you levitating very much these days? Are you feeling wicked psychic right now?”

At The Shenandoah School in Alexandria, Virginia? We all wear uniforms, so the jeans issue is nil. Nobody uses “wicked” as an adverb. And the kids here have mostly been going to school together since kindergarten. Mostly, they just seem frigging psyched that some new girl—me, that is—turned up, giving them someone new to talk to. About psychic phenomena. What I still haven’t figured out is if these kids’ politeness means that they like me or not. The rich are different, that’s all I know. At least these ones are.

“I don’t think I believe in levitation,” I whisper to Brian after a few more minutes of brow-furrowed concentration.

“Me neither,” Brian says back. “I had a theory that ghosts and other purely ‘psychical’ phenomenon could exist in a manner of speaking—” he makes air-quotes “—due to the conservation of energy principle. But my uncle runs the history of the universe lab at Georgetown. He told me that there is no ‘missing energy—’ ” again, with the fingers “—that would have to be accounted for with something like a ghost.”

This is how Shenandoah kids are. They are willing to contemplate the existence of ghosts up until their history-of-the-universe-studying uncles tell them that there is no missing energy to account for. Then they are still willing to experiment, to see if the chair will in fact levitate anyway. There is a weird, worldly earnestness that I am still trying to get used to. Also: the money. My family doesn’t have tons of money—not like these kids—though I’m guessing we have more since we moved to Alexandria, Virginia. And it’s always been enough that I can buy a couple of pairs of decent jeans every year. My dad is, or was, a corporate auditor. I do not know what this means exactly, except that I want to go to sleep whenever he starts talking about work.

My mom used to do a little “consulting” (never clear
about what), but she mostly stayed at home, hovering from a quiet distance over me and my special little brother, Ben, the genius who can’t stand anyone touching him now that she is dead and Roscoe is missing.

Mom was killed in January. She’d been out one night with Roscoe in Georgetown. Mom liked to drive to different neighborhoods, especially across the river in DC, to take Roscoe for walks. She said it was like being on a little vacation, going for a walk somewhere new. And what do you know? She walked right into a random mugging that got out of control. The police caught the guy; he was convicted; now he’s rotting in prison somewhere. I ignored the court proceedings—I can barely remember what the guy looked like. Fortunately all of that ugly legal aftermath stuff went very quickly.

And during that time, honestly, I focused on Roscoe. He ran away during the attack and was never found. I am an atheist, just like Dad taught me to be, but I still pray, in the most atheistic way possible, that Roscoe is alive somewhere. We’re still looking for him. He may have been taken in by a Georgetown family, in which case he is better off than he was when he was our dog. Or maybe he’s lost in Rock Creek Park, or down by the Potomac, or along the Canal … Ben keeps me posted on the staggeringly low odds of lost dog recovery. “Fewer than one in one thousand. And the odds get worse when the dog goes missing in the context of a murder.” When I failed to react appreciatively to this information—Who doesn’t love
information
?—he finally said, “Don’t you want to know the truth?”

“There’s always the one in a thousand,” I replied.

“I said fewer than one in a thousand.”

Now I feel myself starting to cry again. I thought I was
numb enough not to cry in school anymore, but once more I realize that I will never see Roscoe again, just like I will never see Mom again. It would be a great time for the chair to fly away because that would certainly take my mind off these things. I’d take even a little jiggle.

Nothing. Stupid effing book. You cannot levitate.

“Excuse me,” I say to Brian.

I exit the classroom as calmly as I can. A girl named Anne touches my hand as I pass. My private school classmates all came to my mom’s funeral, even though I barely know them. Some of their parents are diplomats, so they know from propriety. Others are lawyers and they know from arguments and legal rights and estate planning and stuff. Point is that they all managed to turn up at the funeral and say things that were meant, I believe, to be comforting and correct. ln the hall, I hurry past the headmaster’s office, point to my tearing eyes, then finally dash into the girls bathroom to heave for a bit before splashing water on my face.

I still don’t believe in ghosts. But I wish I did. Then I could be haunted by Mom the way Ben is. Maybe our relationship could still develop.

People—mostly teachers or other grown-ups who think they are being therapeutic—ask me what Mom was like. I give them the basics: she was taller than me, more elegant. She was in her forties but looked younger. She has a younger brother, my uncle Henry, who lives with his wife on an alpaca farm in Rhode Island. Then they inevitably ask, “But what was she
like
?”

There’s a story I like to tell those people. They usually stop asking questions about her, or about anyone else in my family, once they’ve heard it.

When I was about six and my brother was about three,
my father brought home a golden retriever puppy he named Galt. At the time, my dad thought that “galt” meant gold in German. (It doesn’t.) No, it’s the name of one of the characters in my dad’s favorite book,
Atlas Shrugged
. As it turns out, my dad loves dogs and freedom and certain weirdo books but is not so terrific with languages.