Summary
After Denny’s fraught encounter with Annika, life goes on as usual for a while. Eve remains bedridden at her parents’ house, Zoë continues commuting to school from Mercer Island, and Denny works at the body shop, visiting Eve and Zoë as much as possible. In the middle of spring, an opportunity to get away from his monotonous routine presents itself to Denny: he gets hired by a racetrack in California to drive for an Aston Martin sports car commercial. So Denny packs up his little BMW and takes Enzo down the west coast with him to Thunderhill Raceway Park.
At the raceway, Denny and Enzo walk around the track. Denny explains that in order to really become acquainted with the quirks of a racetrack, a racer has to inspect it on foot. For Enzo, this is a trip of a lifetime, especially when Denny takes him for a few hot laps around the track. Before this moment, Enzo’s passion for racing existed in an abstract realm—he had only ever seen races on television and experienced the rush of racing vicariously through Denny’s stories. But now, he actually feels what it is like to be on a track, and for him, it is the best feeling in the world. Before they take off, Denny tells Enzo to bark once to slow down, and twice if he wants to go faster, and with every passing lap, Enzo barks twice.
Shortly after Denny and Enzo return to Seattle, Maxwell and Trish host a small party in their home, a celebration of Eve. At the party, Eve, gaunt with sickness but dressed in a beautiful gown, says, “Today is the first day I am not dead … And we’re having a party,” (160). Though the partygoers try to keep an upbeat and positive mood, there is a feeling in the air that Eve does not have much time left. When Eve has a moment alone with Enzo, she expresses regret that she decided to live with her parents and wishes instead she were in her home with Denny and Zoë. When the party ends, Denny and Enzo say goodbye and return to Seattle. Eve dies in her parents' home later that night.
The next morning, still unaware that Eve has died, Denny takes Enzo to a dog park on Mercer Island before going to Maxwell and Trish’s house. They are playing fetch when Denny receives a call from his in-laws informing him of Eve’s death. When Denny hangs up the phone, he tells Enzo that Eve is dead and then sobs. While Denny cries, Enzo runs into the woods nearby and hunts a squirrel. He eats the squirrel as a way to connect with his animal instincts, because he could not handle the humanness of the grief he feels for Eve.
When Enzo emerges from the woods, he and Denny drive to The Twins’ house. Eve’s body still remains in her hospital bed—Trish asked the medics to wait until Denny arrived to remove her. Before they enter the house, Denny hoses the blood and dirt off of Enzo. Inside, Denny takes a few minutes alone with Eve to say goodbye. Then, immediately after he leaves the living room, Maxwell pulls him aside and ambushes Denny with accusations of not being prepared for Eve’s death. Trish joins in, and together they tell Denny that they think it would be best if they received full custody of Zoë, their argument being that they can provide Zoë with the privileges of a private education and stable family environment.
Denny refuses to grant them custody of Zoë, but they persist. They tell him to take some time and think about it, but Denny makes it clear that he will never surrender custody of Zoë; so, Maxwell informs Denny that they will be suing him for custody. Denny gathers Zoë and Enzo and storms out of their house, loads up the car, and drives them all back to their home in Seattle. While they were arguing, Eve’s body was taken away in the ambulance.
Analysis
Chapter 26 marks an important milestone for Enzo: it is the first time in his life of hearing and thinking about racing cars that he actually gets to ride in a racecar himself. He finally attains firsthand experience with which to contextualize a lifetime of Denny’s lessons about racing. This experience, and Enzo’s subsequent feeling of being finally initiated into a club of racecar drivers, plays on Enzo’s preoccupation with the differences between intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge. One of the ultimate questions Enzo asks throughout the novel is whether he is truly ready to be a human or not, and his experience at the racetrack with Denny confirms that he does, indeed, share Denny’s need for speed.
The beginning of Chapter 26 contains a hint of foreshadowing during Denny and Enzo’s drive down to California. Enzo remarks that the residual snow in the more mountainous regions of their trip fills him with dread because they remind him of the whole debacle with Annika. At this point in the book, it may seem like Annika has disappeared from the narrative altogether, but Enzo’s passing mention of her at the beginning of the chapter serves to keep her character looming in the mind of the reader, and thus ominously suggests that she will make her way back into the narrative in some significant way.
Eve’s party in the following chapter demonstrates her courage in the face of death and also demonstrates major changes in both Eve and Zoë. Whereas in Chapter 23, Eve enlists Enzo to be her guardian against death, here in Chapter 27, Eve shows that she no longer fears death. She says to Enzo, “I’m not afraid of it anymore. I wanted you with me before because I wanted you to protect me, but I’m not afraid of it anymore. Because it’s not the end” (161).
As for Zoë, her family situation has forced her to grow up too fast. She just started kindergarten, and Enzo finds her talking to herself, saying, “Sometimes bad things happen. … Sometimes things change, and we have to change, too,” (159). Clearly this thought did not originate in Zoë’s five-year-old mind, but it shows how much she has been affected by living with Maxwell and Trish and absorbing their resignation regarding Eve’s death. Enzo tries to console her by starting a game of Enno-fetch, but Zoë tells him that Enno-fetch is a “baby game,” and she has to be a grown-up.
This scene recalls when Enzo promised Denny that he would always protect Zoë, and it demonstrates that as she grows up, Enzo will have to adapt to figure out how best to protect her. During Enzo's last moments with Eve, Eve asks Enzo to take care of her family after she is gone, which directly mirrors Denny’s request earlier in the book, reinforcing the idea that Enzo’s character serves as a source of emotional and spiritual stability for each member of the Swift family.
The fact that Enzo has a dream about Eve’s soul leaving her body on the same night that she dies reinforces the recurring notion of dogs having supernatural, precognitive abilities. Chapter 28 in particular focuses on Enzo’s canine instincts. Enzo’s reaction to hearing about Eve’s death—running into the woods, hunting, and eating a squirrel—represents his uncertainty about becoming a human. The act of killing and eating the squirrel physically manifests Enzo’s anxiety about possibly reincarnating as a human who has to deal with the same grief that he sees Denny and Zoë experience.
The argument between Denny and The Twins over custody of Zoë forecasts a long, uphill battle for Denny. Since it seems rather obvious that Maxwell and Trish have no legal recourse to take Zoë from Denny, this chapter creates the expectation of some future disaster that would cause a judge to deem Denny an unfit parent.
