I was never a particularly timid person, and I resented this welter of small paper cuts that slowly undermined me.
I thought back to when Stefan was two, my sister Amelia watched him while Jep and I set out on a long-delayed week-long honeymoon, part of which was our attempt to hike Angel’s Landing Trail in Zion National Park, which was one of the most harrowing and distressing experiences of both our lives. We were both strong, young and fit. And yet nothing could have prepared us for mincing our way along eskered spines of rusty rock with drops hundreds of feet on either side. At first, Jep cheered me on, telling me to trust my strong legs; but then, halfway up, he suddenly stopped and said, “Thea, are you terrified?” I told him I was. He said, “I am, too. I’m not one of those people who gets high off being terrified. We have a kid. We have a future. Let’s go back down.”
So we did just that, and I was never more secure in what a wise decision it was to marry Jep. That whole idea, of a limited hardship, a finite exposure to danger, was what some people thought of as adventure. If I ever got past this, I vowed never to seek out another risk. From now on, my idea of an adrenaline rush would be ice-skating. In the middle of the night in my living room, I vowed never to do anything, not for any reason, not for any goal, that put me or my family in danger.
There were no more interruptions that night. Stefan gathered his sketches and went to bed. With a few snuffles and wheezes, Molly settled down to her aged-girl sleep.
The next morning, the same young police officer who we had called when the garden was uprooted, who’d come after the house was invaded and the photos were violated, and after the car was set on fire, the one who took milk and sugar in her coffee, showed up and listened to Stefan’s description. After Stefan left for work, in a hurry, she lingered.
“What do you think is really going on here?” she asked me.
“Well, like before, harassment. Somebody’s still trying to scare us. I guess, scare us into leaving. Scare us into going away and living somewhere else. But how did he know Stefan would be awake?”
She considered her coffee mug carefully, turning it in her hands so that the Wisconsin Book Festival logo went around and around. Finally she said, “You don’t want to hear the answer to that.”
“How so?”
“Well, he’s watching you. He’s looking in these windows or he’s got a long-range lens somewhere in a tree or in a stand of bushes and he knows what you’re doing. And maybe he didn’t know that Stefan was going to be working in the library, because the only window in there faces the front. Maybe he didn’t know Stefan would come to the door. That raises a possibility that’s more troubling. What was he planning on doing that he didn’t get to do?”
“I’m not feeling very reassured.”
“My job isn’t just to reassure you, ma’am. It’s to inform you. This other event was…what, eight or nine months ago? That’s a long time for a peeper to stay interested in one family, if it’s even the same person, but I would have to say that if I was a betting woman, I’d bet that it was. Something’s going on here, and I don’t like it, but the fact is, nothing’s been done. Nothing’s even been taken that we know of. No one has been hurt.” She added, “Most of the time, the motive is sexual. Maybe this is, too. But I’m not getting that kind of vibe.”
It was more or less the same thing Pete Sunday had told me. Being a creep wasn’t a crime. Simply terrifying someone wasn’t necessarily a crime. It wasn’t even a threat. It wasn’t even mayhem. Trespassing was a civil offense. The worst that could happen might be a lawsuit for invasion of privacy.
Before she left, the officer tried to come up with a plan. Though it was a long shot, she would make sure that there would be the extra presence overnight of an unmarked car, parked or driving by, for the next couple of weeks. There would be a log and photos of any late-night strollers who seemed to linger a little longer near the house. Keep the windows locked, she told us—as if anyone with our history would not lock the windows—especially on the first floor.
The next day, I was alone at home and restless.
I wanted to see Julie, but she was off on a dental mission. I opened my laptop to start a video chat with her but she was too busy. Her recent emails told me of her fury over a recent dustup: Not once, but several times, she’d been called an “evangetourist.” Global Smiles had been fixing kids’ teeth in developing nations for forty years and had no religious connection of any kind. They’d worked for decades in Haiti and talked their way into rural India where people had no access to dental care—in the country that trained the best dentists in the world. It was Julie’s first time in Africa. At a big UNICEF gathering in Addis Ababa, Julie was confronted by the co-founder of an anti-colonialist organization called BanWhiteSaviors, who told Julie that her organization was more invested in her own smiles than in those of African peoples.