“You’re right about everything. I’m up on the ledge. I have to find a way to vacuum my mind.”
While Jep was in the shower, I put on one of his shirts. He did go downstairs to make a sandwich. He did go down again, for pie. But he held me as I slept. Normally, I wouldn’t have craved this: I’m not a cuddler. Be skin to skin with me while we’re going at it, but afterward, you don’t have to prove anything else: Let me sleep unencumbered on my own little island of cotton and feathers.
In the middle of the night, I heard a crash and Molly’s frenzied growling. She wasn’t yapping, as she did to annoy the UPS guy; she was trying, in her aging, Australian-shepherd-lady way, to warn somebody off her turf. I paid attention, because Molly would have welcomed the ghost of Genghis Khan if he’d brought liver treats. Jep was on his feet, but I was faster, throwing my robe around my shoulders like someone in an English ghost story movie. Stefan was in the kitchen...with, to my horror, a sledgehammer in his hand.
“He was out there,” Stefan said.
“Who’s out there?”
“The guy,” he stammered. His eyes were pits. “The stalker from the road, Mom. The Unabomber.” Stefan said he was up late, working on some sketches for a Whole Blooming World project for which he’d been recommended by Luck Sergenian, a big job with a big budget, doing all the landscaping and plantings for a new college-prep school for girls. He had headphones and some raucous music on, but through it, heard Molly whining and scratching at the patio door. He came out of the library where he’d been working and switched on the light over the back door. He very nearly screamed.
The stalker was standing there, not six feet away, perfectly at rest, his arms by his sides. He wore black tennis shoes and that black sweatshirt with the deep, voluminous hood Stefan remembered from that icy day on the highway back from Black Creek. Stefan couldn’t see his eyes, but he knew the guy was watching him, watching for him, that it was the same person: Something about the slant of the shoulders and the stance had branded itself on Stefan’s memory during those awful few seconds after we spun down the embankment. Stefan didn’t move. The figure didn’t move. Stefan felt that if the stalker rushed the door, he would die—even if the door was double-locked, even if the glass was reinforced, he would die. What should he do? Turn off the light? Call the police?
Just then Molly threw herself against the door, growling and scratching, and Stefan almost let her out, his only fear that the guy had a weapon and would hurt the dog. But instead, he turned and walked away, unhurried, out of the silo of light from the patio fixture. But where had he gone?
Stefan ticked over the locks, basement, front door, garage door...and gasped aloud when he thought of the side door of the garage which we sometimes left unlocked, that led out into the backyard. Forcing himself, knowing that the guy might still be in earshot, Stefan sprinted into the garage, grabbed the mallet, slipped back inside and locked the side door.
I generally hated phrases like “the new normal.” They were slick the first time you heard them, but quickly facile. But this time I could not avoid its apt quality: This was our new normal, in which nothing would ever be normal. What, I wondered now, was this creepy guy’s part in all this? Was he another vigilante, entirely separate from Jill and her minions, with his own dire purposes? Standing around, I well knew, was no crime. So would he ever be stopped?
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.