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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.
“Shhh,” I say, putting a finger to my lips, wrapping my lips around the sound. I hold still, like if I don’t move, no one will see me. We’re in the back of the house, where the front windows don’t reach, but that doesn’t mean we’re completely unexposed.
My first thought is that if we wait it out long enough, whoever is at the door will go away. But then the knock comes again. “Someone’s here,” Lily whispers, really hearing for the first time and registering what the sound is. Her eyes widen. Lily is visibly shaken by the knock at the door. Innocent people don’t usually worry about things like this, but Lily and I aren’t exactly innocent. “Who do you think it is?” she whispers.
“I don’t know.”
“What should we do?”
I reach for the TV remote and drop the volume. “Just give it a minute. They’ll leave,” I say, but as I do, the pounding knock comes again for a third time, followed by the chime of the doorbell. Whoever is at the door isn’t going to leave by choice.
“What if they don’t?”
I say to Lily, “Stay here. I’ll go see who it is. It’s probably nothing.”
I leave the kitchen. I walk through the foyer to the front door, thinking of all the possibilities: a neighbor; some kid selling candy to raise money for his baseball team; a package that needs to be signed for. I turn on the foyer light so that it’s not so dark when I open the door.
I pull the door open to find a police officer standing on the stoop. I draw in a deep breath, trying to be nonreactive but, at the same time, telling myself that even innocent people feel nervous from a police officer coming to their door. A police officer at the front door is rarely good news. It either means you’re in trouble or that someone has died.
The officer is tall. He’s formidable. I’m tall, too, but this man is wide, which I’m not. His chest is broad, filling out his uniform and my front doorframe. His face is long.
“Are you Christian Scott?” he asks, my eyes still taking time to adjust to the foyer light.
“Yeah,” I say, raking a hand through my hair, “Yeah, I am. I’m Christian Scott. Is everything okay? Has something happened?”
