Ten seconds later, the video ends.
The reality of what’s happened plows into me like a tidal wave.
I feel absolutely violated.
It was never Jake. Jake was never in the house. Jake didn’t come home. My mother didn’t see Jake.
She saw someone else. Someone else came into my home when I wasn’t here. An intruder. That’s why he didn’t speak to her, why he didn’t acknowledge her. This man was in the house alone with my mother. He was in Jake’s office. He knocked the key card to the floor, which means he was also digging around in the mail sorter for something. Why? What was he looking for? Money?
I should be grateful my mother is alive, that he ran at the sound of her and didn’t kill her.
“Mom!” I call, in a panic. I step out of the stool. I slip my feet back into my shoes, going to the mail sorter now to thumb through it and see if anything is obviously missing. “Mom!” I call again, this time up the stairs, my agitation increasing exponentially.
I have my back to the stairs. I hear her feet edge near, and she says, “Nina? What’s wrong?” I turn around as she appears at the top of the stairs, coming down in jeans and a shirt that hangs down to her upper thigh.
“I have to run out,” I say, “and I want you to come with me.”
“But you just got home,” she says, looking disappointed. “Don’t you want to relax for a while? I can make dinner.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I can’t, not yet,” I say. I stare at my mother, thinking what could have happened to her Saturday morning. When she reaches the bottom of the steps, I go to her and throw my arms around her.
She laughs me off. I’m not usually so demonstrative. But I could have lost her. This man could have killed her. I feel sick when I think about it. “What in the world has gotten into you, Nina?” she asks.
I wish I didn’t have to tell her what happened, that she was in danger, that maybe we both still are. I don’t want to give her anything else to worry about. She has enough to worry about already. But a strange man was here in the house with her the other day. He let himself uninvited into my home. He was here in my kitchen. He was in Jake’s office and in the foyer. He stood where I now stand. He touched our things. I think of all the things he must have touched, and feel desecrated, like the home is contaminated. I want to call the cleaning lady and have everything bleached.
How do I know this man won’t come back? How do I know he hasn’t already been back? I feel sick when I think just then about the man’s footprint in the mudroom the other night and wonder if it was his. I vigorously shake my head, as if trying to dislodge the thought of this man in my house Monday night as well as Saturday morning.
I can’t leave my mother alone here.
“It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Where are we going?” my mother asks, and I tell her then, reluctantly. I tell her about the videos, and then I tell her that we’re going to the police. She says nothing at first, but her hand comes slowly to her mouth and her eyes go wide.
We head for the car, going through the garage door. I regret washing the mudroom floor the other night. I should have left the shoe print so there was evidence for the police to see. But the video will be enough.
My mother says, “I’m sorry, Nina. I’m sorry I told you it was Jake.”
“Don’t be sorry. It was an honest mistake. You didn’t know.”
But now I’m worried about Jake. He was not here in the home just a few days ago. He’s been gone now, missing, for well over a week. And now our home has been broken into twice and random flowers have been sent to me at work. These things can’t all be unrelated.
At the police station, I give my mother the option of staying in the car, but she comes in with me. She hangs quietly back, a step behind, saying almost nothing. The front desk officer is a man this time. I tell him, “I need to report a break-in.”
“When did this break-in occur?” he asks.
“Saturday.”
He asks me to take a seat and tells me that someone will be with me shortly. It’s busier today than it was the other day. They have to triage the crises as they come in. Mine isn’t an emergency because it isn’t a burglary in progress. No one is hurt. No one is in imminent danger, except for maybe Jake. I feel panicky, because the more I think about it, I think he is. Jake is in danger. I’m anxious to speak with someone. I take a seat next to my mother, but it’s almost impossible to sit still.
Eventually, another male officer comes. He says that his name is Officer Boone. Officer Boone looks to be in his midthirties, a larger man with a serious face but kind brown eyes hidden behind a pair of glasses. He takes my mom and me to a small room and tells us to have a seat so he can take down our report. He sits across from us, settling into a metal chair, not much better than a folding chair.
“My home was broken into Saturday morning when I wasn’t home,” I say.
I tell him the rest. I pull up the video from my neighbor Emilie and slip the officer my phone. He takes it into his hand. He removes his glasses and brings the phone close to his eyes for a better look. He watches, intently focused, and I’m grateful for the attention he gives to it.
The police have some of the best technology available to them. They’ll be able to enlarge this video, to sharpen the image and to see what I can’t see: the face of the man who broke into my home.
CHRISTIAN
Wednesday evening, Lily and I are in the kitchen. Lily is at the table with her laptop grading math assignments online. I’m leaned over the sink, washing dishes. The volume on the TV is turned up high so that I can hear it over the rush of water. There is a basketball game on and every now and then, I look back over my shoulder to see what the score is. I still have work to finish up tonight, a quality check for a colleague that I never got to today because I’ve been playing catch-up all week.
Lily wears her headphones. She’s listening to music while she grades.
I leave the lights mostly off in the house. I’ve gotten in the habit of doing that and, just like closing and locking our bedroom door, it’s one of those things Lily and I do without talking about it, without saying why. But with almost no window coverings on the back of the house, a public trail just outside our back door, and what’s happened with Jake, we feel more on display than ever. Fortunately, only the first few leaves of the season have begun to fall so that the trees still hang on to most of them. They give us some coverage, but there is no fence, no physical boundary, which means there is nothing to say that people can’t just walk off the trail, past the trees and into our backyard.
In the kitchen, only the stove light is on but the TV and Lily’s computer give off light. We also lit a few candles and started a fire in the fireplace. It would be atmospheric and romantic, under different circumstances.
Over the sound of the sink water and the TV, comes a sudden, curt knock on the front door that forces me upright.
I drop the handle on the faucet when I hear it. The water slows but I don’t manage to turn it all the way off so that steady drops come from the tap, plunging into the sink.
Plop, plop, plop.
I turn around, drying my hands on a towel. My eyes go to Lily’s first. Lily heard a noise at the same time, though it was dulled because of her headphones, and I can see from the expression on her face that she’s trying to process the noise, to figure out what it is. She slips the headphones off, looking at me through the semidarkness.