The Theft

On the night of the break-in, I was upstairs painting my daughter’s bedroom. I hoped Erin would see it as a surprise, a kindness, but with kids, you never know. The week before she’d asked us to paint her room ocean blue, and I’d said that was too dark a color, that she’d regret it, and that her mother and I would be forced to spend days going over it with primer, lightening it, erasing the stain. Erin didn’t argue with me; she sighed, a long, drawn-out whistling like a whole second person was leaving her body.

I wanted to shake her, but just because I wanted to hold her like when she was little and wanted to be held by Dad. I told her I was sorry—blue? Okay, blue, why not. She shrugged, defeated, I guess. She’s fragile like that, but only lately.

Many things cannot be erased, no matter how much you wish that they could be. This is one of those truths you have to get to on your own.

The neighborhood we live in is exceptionally safe, and I still think this, despite the break-in, despite what happened. Things can happen anywhere to anyone—who is too precious for a violation? But listen. I mean, no one listens to me, and that’s fine.

We live on a cul-de-sac in a two-story house with gray wood siding, a newish roof (freak hail damage), a greenish lawn, and a mailbox shaped like a mailbox. Our neighbor’s mailbox is shaped like a shark with its mouth open, and I admit I enjoy the novelty, even though it makes me wonder about people.

I say the neighborhood is exceptionally safe not because it’s gated or we’re Richie-Rich types. No, this is mostly white-collar, a little blue-, and we’re not white flight either, not anymore at least. This is Maryland, so by and large we’re Democrats, and that makes me proud. Though the line between relief and pride is thin.

It’s a safe neighborhood because nothing happens here beyond the usual teens with weed, the unauthorized kegger, pills, tax fraud, domestic abuse—because that’s everywhere—maybe even rape, though I hate to think of it. But we’re not a place for burglaries. The crimes committed here are largely internal, within families. The harm we cause is to the ones we love the most.

It’s strange to imagine an outside force slipping in. A giant hand lifting off a roof, plopping the burglar inside. Like Polly Pocket, which my daughter used to beg for. Erin is fourteen and used to be an athlete/​scientist, a mix of youth-league soccer, orange slices, Bunsen burners, and a little duffel full of sweaty lab coats, but last year she turned to drama. Musicals, mostly. When I catch her belting out Rent in the shower, I listen to the lyrics from the hallway and wonder what she understands. I guess she knows a lot, maybe more than most her age.

My wife, Marcia, calls the cul-de-sac the panopticon, but that’s a joke from when we first moved in, when our son, Ryan, was born. We had left the city for the country, the burbs, really. “Cul-de-sac” as panopticon, she’d say, that beautiful throat of hers spinning out the words like candy floss. Like any idea, even a silly idea, when she says it, it has legs.

We’d play “Somebody’s Watching Me” on the portable boom box at the neighborhood picnic when we’d host, and we’d look across the barbeque and laugh, because no one was watching, not really. People are wrapped up in their own misery and vanities, their sex lives and job worries, their kids’ lives.

I like being a regular person caught up in this human mess. I don’t yearn for anything grand. I tell Erin, “Your dad’s an average guy, and that’s okay. When you’re young and want to stand out, it’s normal.” But I like being just another dad in a photograph in an album somewhere. A middle-aged white guy, still on the skinny side, still caring a bit about the clothes he wears, former hippie, but an all-around decent person who helped make two lives, and that’s all right, isn’t it?

I was the only one home when the break-in took place. Marcia was out of town on business; she’s a grants manager for an environmental nonprofit, always flying off to places like Toronto or Toledo, and it’s good for her, I think, this getting away. She stays in hotels and brings home the little soaps, and we joke about opening a B & B.

Erin was away at a friend’s house. I wish I could say which friend, but I’m not sure. I try to be easy and say yes to her because she really doesn’t ask for much (blue room being an outlier). Let’s say it was Gloria’s house. It was a Thursday night, and she went home with the girl on the bus. They don’t need permission to do that in high school like they used to in elementary school, so you have to trust them, which is something I’m working on, trusting your kid to do what they say they’re doing. That if they need something, anything, they’d let you know.

Erin doesn’t like to stay at the house when Marcia’s away on business. She tells me it feels lonely with just the two of us there. And I get it, of course I get it, but it’s even lonelier when it’s just me.

Marcia tried to talk to Erin about not wanting to be home when she’s not home, but Erin started crying, and then Marcia started crying. I can’t blame them, of course. Some things just can’t be put into words.

So, it was a Thursday night, and I was coming off a hard day of work. I do logistics for a construction company, and we’d started a new project. It was a nightmare, with ancient plumbing and loads of additional costs. On the way home, I kept thinking about the empty house I was returning to, the six-pack waiting in the fridge, and how I knew I’d drink them all eventually because what did it matter? I’d be alone.

And this might be why when I saw the Ace Hardware in the shopping center with the Giant Food and the duckpin bowling, I turned my car into the lot and decided that if I could remember the paint color Erin wanted, I would buy everything we needed. I could surprise her with a pyramid of paint cans, and over the weekend we could work side by side with blue rollers, and she’d understand intrinsically that Dad listens, that he’s always in her court, and that even if he doesn’t get it at first, he can come to understand her viewpoint.

I got home just after six, and because it was early March, there was still sunlight at that hour. Since it was just me, I grilled myself a steak. A little reward is how I thought of it, for my good parenting. I had a beer while I grilled, and another while I ate standing up in the kitchen, using the counter as my table. I’d cooked it right, pink and earnest, but it was only me, so what did it matter. No one there to impress.

Die Hard was on, so I watched it as I had the third beer, then the fourth. I was only half watching, really, because I’d started to think that buying the paint was one kind of gesture, sure, but wouldn’t it be something to see the blue in action? Not that I could finish the job overnight, but wouldn’t that be meaningful? A blue wall to come home to?

And sure, maybe this was the beer, or maybe it’s that being lonely makes you want to be busy, but I got excited thinking about putting down the tarps and prepping the walls—it’d been too long since I’d done something with my hands—so I went upstairs to suss out the situation.

At the top of the landing, Erin’s door was open, and I went in, even though it gave me a little bit of pause, like entering without permission. At the same time, painting was clearly an act of love—who could argue with that? I put down the first can and drop cloth, the roller and tray, and I breathed in a lungful of her girl air, which honestly smelled less like cupcakes and sweetness and more like cheese and dirty laundry than I’d expected.

Her walls were pale yellow—I think honeysuckle was the name of the color we’d picked out when she was little. Marcia and I are of the generation that pushed against the strict pink and blue—we liked the neutrality of yellow, the life it gave the space. We always said we’d be the kind of parents who would let their kids be who they were. We’d teach them about safe sex and safe drinking, and we wouldn’t lie to them and call pot a gateway drug, and they’d trust us and tell us everything and we’d tell them our truths in kind. We’d reveal our humanity to them, and maybe they’d choose to reveal theirs to us.

I stood in Erin’s room debating which wall I ought to start with, until I realized how badly I had to pee. I’ve started sitting to pee sometimes, and this was one of those. I think I felt a little overwhelmed at the prospect of what I was taking on, the painting and taping and moving of furniture, and also Erin’s reaction, which, again, you never know. Plus, it was just after seven, and it was already getting dark, so I worried about how well I’d be able to see what I was doing.

Sitting there in the hall bathroom, I was unbelievably tired all of a sudden. Not tired like I wanted to sleep, but tired like I didn’t know how the rest of the day would go, and all the other days after that—and maybe I didn’t care. Something I never let myself think.

I thought about Marcia, too, and whether I was doing enough to make her still love me. Loss is one of those things that either makes you closer to the other person or wedges itself between you like an unwelcome pet. Hungry, taking everything, offering nothing in return. Mostly, I think we’re the brought-closer-together kind, but when she travels, I don’t know. And maybe this is what scares Erin. How easy it is for Marcia to see herself in other lives, other beds, at other kitchen tables. I make a point of holding Marcia when she gets home, reminding her how our bodies align just so.

After I peed, I started trying to remember what color Ryan’s walls were, but I hadn’t gone in there except when Marcia said we needed to get rid of his things. Not get rid of but donate, that was how she said it, to kids who could use them. This was maybe six months after the accident. I remember coming up with a system where I’d hold my breath each time I entered, so I couldn’t smell him or so I’d have something else to concentrate on. His room never smelled adolescent, never the stink of sweat or the cheap colognes to offset the newly hormonal body. His room smelled like boyhood still, skateboard grease and fruity Skittles. And sleep.

It’d been like deep-sea diving being in that room, and I think I would have been okay leaving it as it was, but Marcia said if we weren’t moving (which we couldn’t really afford at the time), we needed to make sure his clothes were put to good use. She refused to maintain a shrine to things, that’s not how she would remember her boy, no. So I held my breath, gathering up his shirts and jeans and putting them into boxes, and when I felt lightheaded, I’d go to the hallway and breathe out. I don’t know if Marcia knew what I was doing.  I could only think of it as just another shipwreck, like I’d be all right if I could avoid the bends.

I stood outside Ryan’s room, or what used to be Ryan’s room, for what felt like a long while. This was a night of long whiles, I guess. But I knew that even if I wanted to go into his room, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like a cliché to be in that position, so I thought about that too. What it meant to have a room stand in for a person, and for that person to be gone so that the room becomes a way to visit them, only the room itself has been stripped of them, so it’s just an empty space. My head hurt. I reminded myself that the whole reason I’d bought the paint, besides making Erin happy, was to busy myself away from thoughts like these. Why be maudlin when I could be useful.

I went back into Erin’s room and began to clear a space. I chose the least busy wall, so all I had to do was move a dresser, take down a couple posters of people I didn’t recognize, not knock over all the tiny bottles of nail polish arranged so precariously. I got so far as to lay down the cloth, to open and stir the paint. I would tape later, I’d decided. I just wanted to see it there, to splash the blue on the yellow so there’d be no going back, unless she wanted to, of course. I was working hard is what I mean, so maybe this is why I didn’t hear anything before the crash. But then there it was, a smashing sound, hard to mistake.

If I’d had to guess, I would have thought it was a window breaking, which it wasn’t, it turns out. I’d left the front door unlocked, so it was the sound of a plate being dropped. The boys—the intruders, I guess you’d call them—had knocked the plate off the counter by accident, and it broke. This was the plate my steak had been on. If we’d had a dog, the dog would have licked the shards of broken plate covered in the dried blood of the animal I’d eaten earlier, but we don’t have a dog. We have indoor/​outdoor cats.

I felt a little afraid at first. Then I wondered if Erin had come home, and I got excited. Maybe she’d gotten in a fight with Gloria, or whoever it was whose house she was meant to be sleeping at. Maybe she could join me in painting. I opened my mouth to say her name, but I hesitated. If I was wrong, then what?

They say fear sobers you, and it does, but not really. It makes you think you can make a good decision, but the alcohol doesn’t just eddy away in the blood. It’s still there. So I did say Erin’s name, but I said it softly. Not a whisper, but the same thing.

Downstairs the TV was still on. But I could hear a voice now, a boy’s, though the words were unclear. I decided I wanted to hear the words he was saying. I wanted to be near that sound. And maybe that doesn’t make sense, but it’s what I thought.

I headed toward it.

What needs to be said is that three years ago, our son, Ryan, Erin’s older brother, was alone in the backyard, playing with lighter fluid and matches, when he accidentally doused himself and his clothing and caught fire. A failed experiment, a nod toward Jackass, an entry into magic we were unaware of—we don’t know. I say accident, because I do know he couldn’t have meant for the fire to go as far as it did. This Marcia and I agree on. He could not have meant to cause the misery he caused, not to himself, and especially not to his sister and his mother. Ryan didn’t die in the backyard; he died two weeks later in the burn unit at Holy Cross Hospital. The truth is, I don’t talk about Ryan’s death, none of us do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right there, a sinkhole disguised as a pothole, a bottomlessness we know to avoid.

Instead, Erin is what we live for. Sweet sibling-less Erin, who may or may not have come home early from her sleepover, maybe to spend time with Dad, who’s lonely, she intuits it even if I’ve never wanted her to need to care for me and Marcia in that way.

I decided to stop midway down the stairs and wait, just to assess the situation. If it was Erin, she wasn’t alone. Like I said, I could distinctly hear a male voice, a boy’s voice—no, two boys’ voices. They were in the kitchen, it sounded like. A GEICO commercial played in the background.

“Erin?” I said it loud enough this time to be heard. Loud enough that maybe whoever was in my kitchen would run away, would scatter.

But they didn’t. They already knew someone was home. Car in the driveway, open door, television quietly transmitting entertainment. Or possibly, and this is what I thought not at first but later, they knew I was home. I mean, they knew it was me.

I am not a big man. When I tell people I work in construction, they know I don’t mean on the jobsite; they understand intuitively I’m an engineer, or a planner, someone who occasionally dons a hard hat to walk among more traditionally masculine men.

I said Erin’s name again, and I made myself walk down the rest of the stairs. Her name feels like a talisman, I remember thinking. If I say my daughter’s name, what further brutality can await me?

Whoever was in the house grew quiet, and then I heard the distinct sound of a beer—my beer—being opened, the bottle opener being dropped on the counter. They knew I knew they were in my home, and they didn’t care. My adrenaline started coursing. We have no weapons. No gun. No rifle. No crossbow. We have a baseball bat, Ryan’s from Little League, but it’s in the garage with all the other repurposable tools. Items that can be made violent by human need.

I wondered what would happen if I stayed where I was at the base of the stairs. If I didn’t move farther, maybe they’d drink the beer and leave, and I could pretend it was Erin and a friend up to no good, taking advantage of Dad, since he’s been made mild by death. Only, that wasn’t the Erin I knew. And what had choosing ignorance ever gotten me? Didn’t Marcia and I talk about the importance of knowing, of not being in the dark?

I walked toward the kitchen. Our house isn’t so big, but big enough in this moment. I was fifteen feet away, then ten, then five. I was just outside, and all I needed to do was peer around the corner and let them see me. On instinct, I put my hand over my stomach, like that was the most vulnerable part of me. Or maybe it was because with all the beer I’d drunk, I could feel my softness, my inherent weakness, in contrast to their youthful vigor. This is what I thought at least. I listened to what they were saying; there were two of them—definitely boys, definitely young—and one of them was laughing. I heard the other beer being opened, and I felt sad because I needed that beer. Especially with all that was going on.

Then I was in the kitchen. All three of us were surprised, I think, though they were wearing ski masks, balaclavas actually, so I could see their lips and the whites of their eyes but not much else. There was no sudden movement like what you’d expect—instead, a strange quiet as if each of us wasn’t sure what we were meant to do. And maybe this is what eased my initial fear, the uncanniness of what was happening. An eerie calm punctuated by the voice of Bruce Willis and Hollywood explosions.

From their clothes and their voices, I guessed they were around the age that Ryan would have been if he were alive. I hated that thought for its immediacy, for the understanding that these were my son’s peers. Even with their masks, I could tell that the one drinking my beer was white and the other darker-skinned, probably Black. I don’t know why I noticed this, or I do, I mean, of course I do, and it made me feel a little guilty if I’m being honest.

I watched them exchange a look, a kind of hesitating pause, and then the one in the red mask took a long swallow of beer, casual or pretending to be, and my immediate thought was that this was a game—they were playing robbers, so what did that make me?

“What are you doing in my house?” I didn’t fold my arms across my chest. I put my hands on my hips instead, also casual. Fingers in the pockets of my jeans, thankful I wasn’t in sweatpants.

The white one wore a red ski mask and the other wore gray. Red Mask looked at me directly, but he didn’t speak. He took another long swallow of his beer. My beer. Then he burped.

“Door was open,” Gray Mask said. He looked down as he spoke, his voice attempting nonchalance. He wore a long-sleeve polo that was too big for him, gaping at the neck. The way he looked down as he spoke, almost shyly, underscored my sense that this was a kid.

“Right, well, I’d like you to leave.” We stood maybe six feet apart. My heart had been beating so fast earlier, but now it felt submerged in goo. Not safe, but unhappy. “I’m in the middle of painting and I really don’t have time for this.” I waved my hand in the air—rational, we could be rational—but I knew even as I thought it that the hope was pointless. I also wasn’t sure I could get them to leave on my own. I doubted it really, but did I want to call the police? I didn’t. Not yet. These were just boys.

Red Mask had something in his gloved hand. He was turning it over and over. Neither of them had spoken, and now as he turned the object over, he looked to his friend as if deciding their course of action. The boy stopped spinning it and held it up for me to see. A Swiss Army knife. I wanted to laugh. It was so small, so ineffective, but he meant me harm, and what was funny there.

The boy palmed the knife. They each wore backpacks, and I had the impression they’d walked here. Out for a wander and there’s the unlocked door. How many other doors had they tried before mine? I wondered briefly if there’d been any. If I wasn’t, in fact, the destination. I was glad Erin wasn’t home.

“You’re trespassing, you know that? How old are you boys?” The word boy felt funny as I said it, but it also made them harmless, mild. “Are you at Blair?” This was the high school Erin attended. “My daughter goes there.”

Gray Mask turned to his friend and exchanged another look. “She here?”

I shook my head, maybe too quickly. “No, it’s just me.”

Red Mask—I got the sense he was the leader—flicked open the knife. He pushed the blade against his gloved thumb, then closed it. I wondered if he’d ever been a Boy Scout. There was planning here, after all. The masks, the gloves, the backpacks, the agreed-upon reticence.

Both boys’ clothes were baggy, but this was the style, I understood. Maybe Ryan would have adopted the same style if he’d lived longer. He’d have started college in the fall. New York, maybe, like his mother, or Philly, like me. Seventeen years old and everything in front of him.

I studied Red Mask’s eyes through the slits, green eyes, though they looked yellow to me in the light. Something slick and familiar in his gaze. “Are you going to answer me? You’re in high school, yes? Is this some kind of prank?”

Gray Mask coughed. “We’re graduating.”

Red Mask glanced at his friend quickly, unhappily, and mouthed something I couldn’t interpret. Gray Mask shrugged in response. A chink in their collective armor, or so I hoped.

Red Mask turned to me and opened his mouth so I could see the pinkness of his tongue, the spit collected on his teeth. He smiled. “We might have known your other kid.”

I nodded at this. I could feel all the alcohol leaving me; abandoning me is what it felt like. And there was no beer left, as they’d taken that from me. “Right, well.” I swallowed, my mouth dry of spit. “Is it money, is that it? Are you here to rob me?”

Red Mask took a step closer so we were on the same side of the island. He still held the knife, but now he pointed it toward me. I thought he looked like a bullfighter, taunting. Or was it threatening? “Seems to me you left the door open. You invited us in here. Basically.”

Now they seemed choreographed. Gray Mask coming closer to me on his side. We were all roughly the same height. They stood equidistant from me, and I wondered what the plan was from here. Maybe they wanted a reason to use force. Burn off their adolescent coolant. Put a grieving man in his place.

I squared my shoulders and stood my ground even as they were on either side of me. “I have some cash, but not a ton. Will you leave after that?”

“How much?” asked Red Mask.

I shook my head. “Does it matter?”

His voice. There was something familiar in Red Mask’s voice, a grating I’d heard before. I felt a tinge of hatred for this boy, a feeling cold and stiff like lard.

They looked at each other across the island. Gray Mask seemed to raise his eyebrows at Red Mask, who held up his hand, wait. Red Mask was thinking. He would take everything he could.

“We tell YOU what matters,” said Red Mask. He wore a sweatshirt with a logo so big I couldn’t read it, if that makes sense. Enormous letters. From the corner of my eye, I saw Gray Mask shake his head quickly, but he stopped when he noticed me watching.

I nodded my head slowly. “Right.” I could hear the TV still, the soft sound of gunfire. On the counter sat the little TV that the kids had watched cartoons on, where Marcia and I’d watch the morning news while drinking coffee. It’d been at least a year since I’d turned it on. I felt my headache returning, the beer or the day at work. I had Erin’s room to paint; I’d almost forgotten. “I’ll get my wallet.”

I turned to leave the kitchen, but Red Mask blocked me. Came up to me so close I could smell him. The stink of his perspiration and the noxious body spray over it. I caught him by the shoulder. I wanted to look at him, make him see me, but he jerked away. “Fuck off, pedo.”

His friend was next to me too, then, and like I said, we were all the same height. My adrenaline jolted, just slightly, just a bit. I couldn’t place Red Mask exactly, not a name or anything, but I had a feeling, a certainty that this was a boy I’d spoken to before.

Gray Mask gestured to his friend. “Enough of this bullshit. Let him get the money.”

Red Mask poked me with the end of his little blade, right in the chest, a tiny prick. “Don’t fuck with us.”

And how would I? Or rather, why would I? This is what I wonder now, forever. Why does anyone hurt another person when they don’t have to?

When I was their age, I protested the Vietnam War and fought for civil rights. I tried to be a good person. And I have not been good enough, or why else this outcome? I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, it was still my kitchen, still an early March evening, still Planet Earth.

Without faces, these boys could have been anyone. But they weren’t anyone, they were boys who had come to hurt me, to rob me or torture me or cause chaos for chaos’s sake, or maybe, maybe they had something to tell me. This thought was the most dangerous of them all.

These were boys who knew my son. They’d come to me, so in a way, they were mine. And I, of course, was theirs.

Red Mask put the knife in his pocket and smiled at me, a ghost of a smile made visible through the gap in his mask. I watched dumbly as he turned and walked out of the kitchen, headed for the stairs, toward the bedrooms where Erin’s paint was already drying, caking in its opened container.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked; the weak words of how many thousands of fathers before me were all I could manage.

“The best shit’s always upstairs,” said Red Mask.

I reached to grab Gray Mask’s shoulder, to pull him back, but he shook me off, and I was left to follow them, simmering, impotent, struck by the sensation Red Mask knew where he was going, that my home was a familiar space.

How intimate the upstairs of a house can be. I pictured again the Polly Pockets that Erin used to collect, and how she liked them because of what was hidden away and how it was in her power to reveal it. Now these boys would know our secrets, at least a few of them. The stale water glass on the bedside table. The slippers worn and dirty. The condoms and the lube tucked away. The diary of a girl like Erin reeling from her brother’s death, all of us reeling.

When we got to the top of the landing, they stopped. Ours is not a big house, really. There are four rooms upstairs. Erin’s bedroom, our bedroom, the bathroom, and what used to be Ryan’s room. Our room is farthest from the stairs, at the end of the hallway. So I mean, the house—it’s not small, it’s not big, it’s average, an average-size house for as many people as used to live here.

I could feel Erin’s open bedroom door like a vulnerability, a soft part of myself. Yet my options felt meager; I could still call the police, but I’d need to leave the boys to find a phone, and I worried, maybe stupidly, how calling would make me appear. Physically, I doubted myself and my ability to overtake them. So what recourse was left? I wanted to block every room, every precious organ of this failing familial body, but I couldn’t. There’s not enough of me, there never has been.

“The money’s downstairs in my wallet. I don’t know what you’re looking for up here.” I said this to their backs. Gray Mask turned to look at me—and I saw pity in his eyes briefly, but then that faded, hardened I guess, when he saw me see him.

“We’ll get to that,” said Red Mask. He walked the few feet to Ryan’s bedroom door and stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

“Please don’t go in there.” I moved so that I blocked the door. “Let me just get you the money.”

“Go ahead and get it,” said Red Mask. His hands in his pockets, casual, waiting. He glanced toward his friend, and my eyes followed.

Gray Mask had moved farther down the hall to Erin’s room, her open door. I could see him peering inside, and I thought of the open can of paint. How I could splash them both with ocean blue, mark them. The mess that would need to be cleaned up tomorrow.

My body could not be in two places at once.

I stepped toward Erin’s door, an instinct, and when I moved, Red Mask pushed forward and turned the knob. Ryan’s door clicked open, and Red Mask entered. Gray Mask touched my shoulder, then stepped past me, hesitating ever so noticeably on the doorjamb as he followed his friend. They knew my son. They knew him.

The click ignited something in me. Call it rage, a hallucination of embers, what lives in the volcano’s belly until it can no longer be contained. I would hurt them.

Punish them like I had not been able to reach Ryan. I would push the weight of myself—older, yes, but heavier too—onto their still-young bodies. Force them to the floor with the strength of my billowing fury, my stinking grief. I would make them scream until they told me the truth, told me why it was happening, why it had happened.

I squeezed my hands into fists. I braced my shoulders, my legs. I compelled all the strength in my body to hold taut. Five feet away, four, three. I didn’t hold my breath, I stepped inside. And then there we were, the three of us in Ryan’s bedroom. The shock of it, like cold water but also the calm of a dive.

Marcia had made the room into a guest room a couple years back. She’d said that would give it new life. But I saw that she’d left little pieces of him in there too. A Green Day sticker he’d put on the wall, a stain on the carpet from where he’d spilled Dr Pepper and left it overnight. But there were gaps, too, so many absences. The boom box and the piles of cassettes and CDs no longer crowding the carpet. The Tony Hawk poster was gone, as was the earlier poster of The Lion King, which had been his favorite movie for years, much later than would have been cool to admit. The silly sock puppet his sister gave him that he slept with, always hidden, tucked away in his sheets. The desk was still his desk, the dresser his old dresser with the scratches on it from where he and his friends had carved their initials. What trouble he got into for that one.

“This was his room?” asked Gray Mask.

“It is.” It was. My hands were still balled into fists, but the muscles wouldn’t hold. I looked at the two of them peering around with their masked faces. Curious, greedy, but they were children, someone’s children, on the cusp at least, not yet fully men. And who would they become? What a privilege to become someone else.

Inside his room, I was doused, plunged, I wasn’t me anymore. Even the insult of their disobeying me, that too stripped away. What remained?

The bedroom was carpeted a pale cream color. We’d had his and Erin’s rooms carpeted, I can’t remember why now, but I think it was the softness—we’d wanted them to have that softness.

“You did know him.” I stood in the middle of the room, the boys on either side of me. “Did you come here to see this? You could have asked, you know. We let his friends come by after, to take what they wanted.” Marcia always reminded me he’d been loved. Had he also, I wondered now, been disliked? Been hated?

“What makes you think we were friends?” asked Red Mask.

This boy’s voice, so familiar, on the edges of my brain. “Why else did you come here?” I waved my hand through the air, my knees weakening. “If you’re just here to rob me, then why are we here?”

Gray Mask put his hands on top of his head. He looked at his friend, trying to get his attention, but Red Mask didn’t return the look; he stared at me. I knew him, and he knew me, or he thought he did.

I didn’t think about what I did next. It just happened. One minute I was standing in the middle of the room, and the next I was lying on the carpet, staring up at the popcorn ceiling. It wasn’t that I fell, it was that the ground compelled me, the softness a command.

The boys stared down at me through their eyeholes. I realized I liked this, their mouths open in confusion. “Tell me what you know.”

“We don’t have to tell you shit,” said Red Mask.

“Well, I don’t have to give you money until you do.” I folded my arms under my head, elbows out. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t smell my son, I realized. His scent was gone. Instead, I was smelling the untouched sheets, Tide or what-ever Marcia had bought on sale.

I felt one of them nudge me with his shoe. “Man, you okay?” This was Gray Mask.

“What did he mean to you?” I couldn’t say his name, I realized. I felt a dryness in my mouth. There was no beer anymore, but downstairs I had whiskey left over from a cake that Marcia had made. We’d stopped keeping a stocked bar after those early blackout months, but I remembered the whiskey now. “Maybe you know something I don’t? You feel guilty, that’s why you’re here?”

I could hear them shuffling around, conferring with each other about how I was foiling their plan, or I hoped so. They whispered back and forth. Gray Mask raised his voice, he wanted to leave, but no, Red Mask wasn’t finished, there was still the money, there was still more I ought to suffer.

It was peaceful here in Ryan’s room with my eyes closed. Warm and dark. Maybe this is why Erin wanted her walls blue. I heard a door open and close in the hallway. I thought about the open can of paint, but I didn’t care. Let the paint dry.

I’d abandoned my son, that much felt true. To be so long away from him, what remained of him.

“He probably died to get away from you.” This was Red Mask; I knew without opening my eyes. I also felt sure then that I knew who he was, a neighborhood kid, the kind to step on a cat’s tail, to crush a newly planted flowerbed with his bike tires—no friend of my son’s as far as I knew, but he’d come here. I listened to his breathing. “It’s not like he just died. Get over it.” There was something beyond the nastiness in his voice, but what? Not an apology, but desire maybe. To be loved as I’d loved Ryan. I was sad for him, for me, for what I wanted to be true.

“That’s not a nice thing to say.” I felt a shoe in my side. “You know, I get it. You want to rebel a bit; the world doesn’t make sense—”

“You don’t get shit.” A kick, this time hard into my stomach.

I gasped a little to catch my breath. “I do get it, that’s the thing.” What feeling was there left to get? By now we’d felt it all, Marcia and I, each little splinter of pain, each little tremor of joy. “But young people don’t believe adults and that’s okay. Why should you take our word?”

The boy stepped on my finger then, slowly adding more weight. But the carpet cradled me, it saved me.

“No wonder he was such a little bitch, with a dad like you.”

“Man, what the fuck. Let’s go!” Gray Mask called to his friend from the hallway. The pressure disappeared, and my finger was free.

I opened my eyes, but the room was empty. Marcia and I had recently got-ten cell phones, and I wondered now where mine might be. It still felt strange, this reachability, none of the old wonder. I thought about Ryan lying on his floor like this, and what if the mystery of him was connected to being in the places he was? From the hallway, I heard a loud noise. I knew I needed to see what they’d upset, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave his room just yet; I didn’t know when I’d be able to return. My head hurt.

I sat up. From the hallway I could hear them wreaking havoc. Punishing me for not playing along with their game. And they should be angry. Because I was angry too. Because none of it made sense, and maybe it never would.

His walls a sweet, pale orange, how could I have forgotten.

When Erin was little, when both kids were little, and I mean little little, I’d been blown away by their perfection. That humans with our clumsiness and selfishness and ugliness could make something so clean and smooth, that skin was ever this untarnished, that toes and fingers and earlobes were as new as a new car, and no wonder we craved newness, everything humans were taught to desire tried for this same honesty, this freshness. Baked in were dirt and future trauma, ugly thoughts, and hurtful actions, but now I knew that goodness existed too, that somewhere out there were forms of life that had yet to cause misery, that would eventually decay and trip and break down, but in their first iteration, see how the idea of wholeness might exist? Yet from the beginning, everyone needed someone to protect them. Perfection and vulnerability forever linked. Each newborn wholly reliant on the care of others.

We needed each other. Whether or not that meant we had what it took.

I heard a crashing sound like the first crashing sound, and I thought immediately of the paint, what I’d set in motion, and it struck me that Marcia and Erin might not understand what I was doing. Wouldn’t get why Dad just let this happen.

I came in with my hands up. They weren’t in Erin’s room, thankfully. They were in my bedroom. Red Mask was kicking a lamp that he’d knocked to the floor.

“Eli. What did you come here for?” Did it make me feel better or worse to name him, to end this charade, or pretend that I could?

Gray Mask sat on the edge of the bed, but he turned to me on hearing his friend’s name. Red Mask, Eli, kicked the lamp again, ripping the shade, ignoring me. Then he turned to me slowly, dramatically. “Money. Duh.” Gray Mask shook his head and stood. He was done.

I looked around the room. They’d pulled out the topmost dresser drawers, opened the closet, tossed up the sides of the comforter to look beneath the bed. Finally, they were acting as robbers in a kids’ game should. The sad thing, the embarrassing thing, I realized, was that I didn’t want them to go. They made him real, alive; he was a boy again because they were boys: cruel, imperfect, breathing in my home.

They’d already opened the drawers to the bedside tables, but they’d missed the money. I counted it, $75 in an old eyeglasses case. I held it out to Gray Mask, but I didn’t let go. “Was there anything you’d heard? Please.”

He looked at me for a moment. I imagined him sweating beneath his mask. His eyes were kind, I decided, though maybe it was guilt I detected. Something human. He opened his mouth, and I could see his throat, the darkness there. “I didn’t really know him.” He looked at Eli, then at the floor, the hardwood.

“Anything?”

Gray Mask squeezed his hands together. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know why he was alone. If he meant to do it.”

Eli started to speak, but Gray Mask held up his hand to stop him. I hadn’t drawn the curtains; I usually forgot to close them when Marcia was away. From our window that faced the cul-de-sac, you could see darkness and suburban sprawl and a fish-shaped mailbox. “All I heard is rumors,” Gray Mask said.

“Okay.” The money lay on the bed between us, a handful of bills, almost nothing.

Gray Mask shook his head; he spoke to the floor. “What I heard is he meant to do it.”

Eli grunted, and Gray Mask turned and stared at his friend. Then he leaned forward and took the money off the bed, slid it into his pocket.

My legs were soft. I had felt everything, but had I felt this? I looked at Eli. He lived across the street, but they’d never been friends. “What do you know?”

Eli sighed. “Give us the rest of it first.”

I looked from Eli to his friend. But Gray Mask wouldn’t look at me; he was a stranger again, masked jaw set, eyes on the door, his escape.

Stumbling, I went to the dresser and opened the drawer with Marcia’s bras and underwear. I dug through the lace and nylon and cotton. And then I felt the lump, a little silk baggie with something inside it.

Slowly, I drew it against my chest, then I held it out before me. Gray Mask and Eli approached so they were surrounding me again. One on either side of me, not a family. I opened the little bag carefully, loosening its drawstring. There was money, two fifties folded together and a twenty. There were also some little loose pieces. A tarnished silver ring, a pin with a peace sign. And there was something else. Teeth. Little baby teeth. And bigger ones too. Adult teeth stained an ugly gray.

Eli took the money from my hand. He gestured at the ring. “That worth anything?”

I shook my head, then I nodded. “Sentimental value.”

Eli reached for it and took it out of my open palm. He was careful not to touch the teeth.

Gray Mask shuddered, turning away.

I closed my hand, felt the teeth’s sharp points scattered and hard against my palm. “Now tell me.”

Eli shook his head and whistled. “This is some bullshit, not even $200.” He pushed the money into the wide pocket of his jeans. He scratched his nose, and the mask moved, I could see even more of his face, but he didn’t care. “He was a freak. Mental problems and all that.” He smiled again, but the smile wasn’t real, it was stolen, a caricature. “Like one of those crazy monks from the war.”

I didn’t think. I reached out, and my hand was on Eli’s throat, not hard but steady. “What?”

Eli blinked at me. His eyes were the slightest bit moist, maybe from the pressure of my grip, I couldn’t say. He didn’t struggle, he looked right at me until he looked away. “I don’t know why freaks do what they do.” He coughed, and I squeezed harder. “It’s not my fault.” He looked at me again, unsmiling. “Was it yours?”

I let go. There was nothing to hold onto, I mean.

Gray Mask said nothing, but he moved to the door. I willed him to look at me, but he wouldn’t. He owed me nothing.

I followed the boys as they left the room, past Erin’s room and the smell of fresh paint, back downstairs. The TV was still on, Die Hard still playing, neutered by basic cable and commercial breaks. The shards of the plate were on the floor in the kitchen. The last two beers empty but for a swallow each.

I watched the boys as they filled their backpacks with random things from the kitchen. One took the blender Marcia made her protein shakes in, and the other took a vase, a coffee cup, Erin’s iPod neatly wrapped with headphones and Rent on cue, a bag of Doritos. I could have stopped them, but I didn’t.

We were by the door, whatever fight in me extinguished. The boys shouldered their bags, zipping up, patting their pockets where the money now lived.

Then the front door was open again.

The night was dark. I thought I could smell something, a neighbor grilling meat, burning it slightly, but it was after eight and too late for that.

I stood by the entrance, blocking them. “You knew I’d be like this.”

Eli looked at his friend, then back at me. He shrugged. He pushed past me, and I let him.

In the dark I couldn’t see the other masked face, only the whites of his eyes, his teeth. He hesitated, then he reached in his pocket and tossed the money back inside. He stepped past me, his shoulder brushing mine. Then he was caught in the streetlight, and they both were so visible, as if I could see inside them, could ever know them. Gray Mask pulled off his mask and looked at me. “If he meant it, I bet he regrets it.”

They were gone. Boys whooping to each other, yelling in the darkness, running away. Still young and breathing.

I left the front door unlocked. They weren’t coming back. The house phone was ringing as I entered, and I’d need to answer it. What if it was Marcia coming home early, or Erin needing a ride home? The upstairs was in ruin, but what was missing? Not much.

I turned to face the stairs, but my legs wouldn’t move. Blue paint. All that was ahead of me, waiting. I sat down on the hard floor. I knew then I’d ask Erin first. I couldn’t take away her choice. The chance for regret.

In the background Bruce Willis saved the day, and the phone stopped ringing.

Read more from Issue 21.2.