A New Enemy (Enemies 1)

With a long sigh, I surveyed the living room. Tiger Lily was asleep on the coffee table. I’d padded a shoebox for her, easy for me to carry with me wherever I went in the house.

Mischa and Echo had gotten their last walk for the day, and they’d been fed, so they were resting by the patio doors. I briefly considered turning on the TV, but I changed my mind just as quickly. I wanted silence. No, I wanted the sound of the ocean.

I walked into the adjacent kitchen and flicked off the lights. Then I did the same in the living room, leaving only one, in case Teddy needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

I squatted down in front of the dogs and scratched Echo behind his ears. “You stay here, buddy. Look after Teddy.”

Echo was a chatty boy. He licked my wrist and talked to me, which sounded like a string of “oorrww” and “wrraah.” One of the reasons I’d always loved Huskies. They were talkers. But Echo took it to the next level. He’d sometimes tried to mimic sounds. Hence his name.

His white-and-silver coat gleamed in the dim light from the windowsill. Same coat as his brother, though Mischa’s was a little darker. Both had the most beautiful blue eyes that had seen too much. Mischa had some scarring around his ears that would never fade. It served as a reminder of what useless scumbags humans could be.

I’d probably never find out if they disliked snow because of ingrained memories from their first years alive. Abused and neglected, they’d been kept in a too-small courtyard with thirteen other Huskies up in Alaska, just outside of Juneau. Maybe the snow brought them back to those conditions, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was, when it snowed here, they weren’t eager to go outside.

“All right. Time for Daddy to get some downtime.” I rose with a grunt and patted my thigh for Mischa to come with me.

I picked up Lily’s shoebox on the way and headed for the stairs. Each step creaked and protested, much like the rest of the house. “It sings to us,” my grandmother used to say when it was windy outside.

Artists were kooks, and she’d been the queen. This house had been her studio. Every single wall, every cupboard, every shelf, the porch outside, the balcony upstairs, the railings, the shutters—pretty much all of it was white. To give focus to her paintings. She wanted accents in full color and the background white.

“That doesn’t mean the background isn’t vital. You can’t hang a painting in the air.”

Pops had been her background. A necessity to her, something she’d needed to breathe easier. Her own words. And she’d been his painting. His wild and wacky work of art that he’d admired throughout their marriage. He could control everything that happened at the orchard. He played God with different types of soil, seeds, hybrids, and whatever else struck his mood. But with Nana, he’d always sat back and watched. Through her years as an art teacher, then full-time artist, through gallery openings and exhibits, through sleepless nights where impulsiveness reigned, like when she suddenly decided to open a youth center.

Growing up with them had made me wonder lately if I was the necessary background or the painting that made life exciting.

Maybe I was neither.

Once I got upstairs, I opened the door to the bathroom a foot or two. Just enough so Lily could get to her makeshift litter box. If she even bothered. She’d just started using it. More often than not, she went on the living room carpet, the porch, or the bathroom mat up here.

The rest of the upstairs was my bedroom. The slanted ceiling on both sides made it less spacious than it could be, and yet it was one of my favorite elements of the house. Nana would use the short beams across the ceiling to hang canvases to dry. She went through a phase when I was fifteen where she painted on fabric.

Mischa knew the drill as soon as I walked over to my modest bar table. Instead of jumping up on the bed, he aimed for the balcony and pushed the door open.

An ocean breeze flowed through the room instantly, only to ebb out before it escaped through the small window near the stairs.

I poured a glass of dark rum and picked a new cigar, then followed Mischa out to where my sofa waited for me. Lily slept through every step. Maybe the motions were lulling…?

“Tomorrow should be nice, huh?” I got comfortable on the cushions and placed the shoebox on the side table. Along with my drink. “Ten bucks Soph tells me to be nice to her brother.”

I smirked to myself as I lit my cigar.

David was the squeaky-clean brother of the family. He’d done everything right—and Tennessee wasn’t that far away from Georgia. Sophia had been their parents’ precious angel until she’d decided to leave the South for the Northwest. It was way too far, although they’d accepted it begrudgingly. However, when Teddy was born and his asshole of a biological father abandoned them—because apparently Down syndrome was just too much for him to handle—Sophia’s folks had demanded she move home. Their fights had been vicious and turned into acts of manipulation and downright cruel accusations. For the first few years of Teddy’s life, Soph had barely spoken to her parents.