Housebreaking (35 page)

“Hold this.” He pulled out a duffel bag and knelt in front of the home entertainment center. He took handfuls of DVDs from the shelf, pushing aside books and glass figurines. “
Matrix
trilogy,” he said. “Someone's got good taste.” In the dining room, he rifled through the drawers of a hutch with glass doors. She knew they were alone, but her body still expected someone from upstairs to call out at any moment:
Who's down there?

“You're making way too much noise,” she hissed.

“Chill.”

He opened a velvet-lined silverware box and studied the contents, as if he knew anything about silver, then overturned the box into the duffel bag—spoons, forks, and knives—all landing with a clang, the bag growing heavy in her hands.

“What are you going to do with this stuff?”

“Pawnshop.”

“Are you joking? Have you even been to a pawnshop?”

“They got 'em on every street corner in my old neighborhood in Dallas. I bought my first laptop there for forty bucks.” He took the duffel from her and slung it over his back. “Upstairs.”

“You first,” she whispered.

She waited on the landing as he ascended the stairs, the bag clinking against his back. He disappeared down the hallway in the dark. She expected a scream, a commotion, the bark of an angry dog, but he reappeared a few moments later saying, “All clear.”

After that, after she was truly certain they were alone, it was easy, it was scary-fun. She checked the bathroom at the top of the stairs, but found only the usual guy crap—toothpaste, razor blades, the same stinky soap on a rope she'd given her father for his last two birthdays.

In the big bedroom at the end of the hall, Billy rifled through bureaus and closets, opening and closing drawers. There was a king-size bed, neatly made, with a floral comforter. Did Salt and Pepper sleep here? The room smelled of old people. For a moment she was uncertain: Had she made a mistake? Had she broken into the wrong house? But no. That was impossible. She scoped out the place like a professional burglar. She'd cased the joint. There was no mistake.

“Bingo,” said Billy, taking something down from the top shelf of the closet.

A jewelry box. He dumped the contents onto the bed and spread the jumble of silver and gold with his hands. Rings, necklaces—old-lady stuff. There was a brooch shaped like a peacock with a spray of emeralds for feathers.

“They won't give you anything for that. They'll know it's stolen.”

“They don't give a shit.”

Why was she trying to talk him out of taking the jewelry? This had been her idea, not his. But she'd wanted to mess with Salt and Pepper, not some old lady. Was this his mother's jewelry? His grandmother's? On the bedspread, a sapphire ring caught her attention, glimmering cornflower blue. She held it up to a strip of light from the window. The stone was square-cut and encircled with small diamonds, set in white gold. She put it in her jacket pocket and zipped the pocket shut. In all likelihood she was robbing a dead lady, or someone cooped up in a nursing home. That must be some kind of sin. A
venial sin
, perhaps. The phrase popped into her head, unbidden.

As Billy fumbled in the closet, she stepped into the master bathroom and closed the door behind her. There were no windows, no one to see what she was doing. She turned the wall switch and there came a flickering like lightning, then a stunning fluorescence. She blinked into the brightness until her eyes adjusted.

She pulled open the mirrored cabinet. Unlike in the other bathroom, these shelves were crammed with prescription bottles. She checked the labels, her eyes widening. Valium, Ativan, Percodan, Vicodin.
Jackpot.
A fucking junkie's cabinet. She couldn't have hoped for anything better. On the lower shelf there was a stack of thin prescription boxes, at least ten of them. She read the label: morphine sulfate suppositories.
For insertion into back passage
. Morphine, just one step below heroin, something she had never tried. The morphine tablets were a year out of date, but that wouldn't matter.
Side effects
, said the label,
include euphoria.

Euphoria
, she thought.
What an excellent concept
.

She stuffed a couple of the boxes into her pocket and was reaching for more when Billy yelled her name. The noise made her heart skip. She froze. Then the door opened and he grabbed her hand.

“Move!” he screamed.

“What? What happened?”

They bolted, flashlight zigzagging crazily across the ceiling and walls—all
Blair Witch
and out of focus—down the stairs, feet thumping on the rug. “Run run run,” he was saying. At the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated for a split second, then bolted toward the kitchen. She ran blindly, following him in the darkness. A garage door rumbled. Someone was parking the car. In the kitchen, she tripped on a dog bowl, which went clattering and splashing across the floor. He pushed open the door they'd broken into and they ran into the backyard. He stopped at the fence at the rear of the yard and cursed, his breath steaming.

“What?”

“I left it.”

“Left what?”
The duffel bag
, she realized before he could respond. Could they trace it to them? Did they leave anything else behind in their panic? “Forget it. You can't go back.”

He hesitated for a moment. “Shit,” he hissed, giving in, and they vaulted over the fence and raced away into the night.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY
was vacation—the day shoppers mauled each other for marked-down kitchen appliances—and then the weekend came and went, and then—
back to school
.

“No way,” she told her mother. The prospect gave her shivers, if she weren't in the proper state of mind.

For four days now, ever since raiding Salt and Pepper's medicine cabinet, she had been absent, a spectator at her own death. That was what morphine felt like—being dead but awake for it. Most of the time she was floating on the ceiling looking down at her body, observing herself but also inside herself. It felt exquisite to be so still, to be without pain, without movement. How pleasant to be dead, to be nowhere. She'd spent an hour, or what felt like an hour—perhaps it was half the day—contemplating lifting her arm, then deciding no, she would not lift her arm. She'd been unaware of the passing minutes and hours. There was only the eternal present, she nodding in and out, on the border between real and unreal. The label prescribed one capsule for every twenty-four-hour period. She'd doubled, then tripled that dosage, inserting a suppository whenever she felt the fade.
After 24 hours,
said the pharmacist's label,
expel from rectum as if moving bowels.

Gross.

The requirements of the body were so gross. There was
her
and there was this
thing
she had to carry around. Feed it and bathe it, make it go to the bathroom, suffer its illnesses, endure its discontents. It was blissful to exist outside the body, above it, her real self looking down.

Sometime that evening she felt the high dissolving. She reached for the packet of morphine and found it empty. All gone, just empty plastic receptacles. She checked the clock: It was 9:42
P.M.
, Monday night. This was now, the time of the living. All the triviality suddenly returned, like geese splashing down in a pond. She felt a panic descending, a four-day backlog of anxiety, striking all at once. What had she forgotten? What had she done?

She got up, feeling suddenly light-headed, and steadied herself with a hand on the dresser. The world was spinning and she with it. She grabbed her fleece jacket and went through the pockets: There it was, what she'd forgotten.

The sapphire.

Her face stared back blankly from the dresser-top mirror. Her skin
seemed paler, her lips, darker, almost goth. She practiced a smile, observing the results. Curious, this mask. How strange that people considered it
Emily
. She had been outside her body for four days. Shamans, she'd once read, could free their spirits, could hover above themselves the way she had. They did it through trance and a lifetime of training. She wanted to get back there a whole lot faster. She combed her hair and changed into her low-cut jeans and a belly shirt, a suitably slutty look.

The sound of the TV came from the den, voices speaking in French. Audrey, the Netflix addict, sat on the couch. Emily tiptoed down the hall—her father still at work—and stopped in the kitchen for a belt from his Black Label, a super-long shot, slugging directly from the bottle.

She grabbed her sweatshirt from the closet, stepping around the dog. Sheba whined and got to her feet, but Emily shushed her. “Stay,” she whispered. She closed the door behind her and went out into a cold night, her first breath of fresh air in a long time. Immediately, she felt shivery and light-headed, but light-headedness was part of the shaman program, was it not? For four days she had holed up in her bedroom with almost no food—a few handfuls of baby carrots and cheese sticks—peeling away the excess layers, eradicating all but the essential. Her bedroom was her sweat lodge, morphine her peyote.

Above, a plane passed over the crest of the mountain. She could imagine the scene from the cockpit: all the little houses, lined up like cereal boxes on a shelf. They all looked the same, probably
were
the same design, inside and out, built by the same hand sometime in the black-and-white 1950s.

She approached his driveway. Inside, the bluish light of the television glowed from the first-floor den. She rang the bell, and a few moments later the porch light came on. He appeared in the doorway, stubble on his cheeks, a curious expression. “Yes?”

“May I speak to the lady of the house?” she asked. A bizarre question, but she was winging it, letting her actress-self take over.

He had a glass in his hand. Whiskey, it looked like. She felt drunk just sniffing the alcohol. But she knew how to cover herself; no one ever knew how wasted she was, right up until the moment of blackout.

“What's up? Selling Girl Scout cookies?”

“Not exactly.”

He studied her, his eyes narrowing in recognition.

“Do you know who I am?”

“I think so,” he replied. “You live in the farmhouse, right?”

That surprised her. She hadn't counted on that. As far as she knew, he'd seen her only that one time, when he'd given her a pervy stare from the driver's seat and she'd responded with the finger. She suffered a moment of hesitation, contemplating the consequences. Fuck it. She didn't want to think about consequences. She'd come this far. Stupid to back out now. “You won't tell my mother, will you?”

“Tell her what?”

“About this.” She dug into her pocket and produced the sapphire. He leaned forward to study her open palm. His face changed, and then he picked the ring out of her hand and said, “Come in.”

In the hallway, the dog raised its snout as she went by. The house smell reminded her of that night, but the rooms seemed benign now, absent the manic zigzagging flashlight in the darkness. He passed the den, his seducer's lair, with the fireplace burning in the background. She could hear the wood crackling and hissing, and she decided it wouldn't be so bad if she were to fuck him. Like mother, like daughter. That would be a victory of sorts, to get his pants down, his cock inside her. But he directed her into the kitchen and pulled out a chair for her.

“This was my mother's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present,” he said, placing the sapphire on the table. “She only wore it on special nights, to weddings and galas.”

“It's beautiful.”

“Would you care to tell me how you got it?”

“Can't you guess?”

“Did someone give it to you? A boy named Billy?”

Emily blinked, trying to focus. How could he know about Billy? Had he found out, somehow? Had Billy gotten caught? She hadn't even seen him or talked to him since that night. Did this man know about the raided medicine cabinet, the missing morphine? Would he call the cops now? A gauze filter seemed to cover her brain. Everything seemed loud and echoing—the drip of the faucet, the rasp of the oven clock, his breathing. “No,” she said. “Try again.”

“Emily. That's your name, right?”

“Yeah. What's yours?”

“Benjamin.”

“How about I just call you Ben?” She leaned back to take off her sweatshirt, and her head felt loose on her neck. She tied the sweatshirt around her waist, offering him a view of her breasts.

“You want me to believe you did it? Broke into my house?”

“Bingo.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To pay you back for fucking my mother.”

“That's crazy.”

“Is it? I saw you. You and her together.”

“I don't know what you saw—”

She reached for his glass and took a sip. The cough-liquid boozy vapors made her head swim. “Whiskey and ginger ale,” she said. “Yum.” This was the preblackout stage, the part she wouldn't remember later, just flashes of this and that, the part she liked the best because she wasn't responsible, there would be no memory, nothing to cringe over or be embarrassed about.

“I'm going to call your mother. I think she should hear this.”

“Good idea. You call Audrey. I'll call my dad.” She took her cell phone out of her jeans and handed it toward him. “He's a lawyer. We'll get the whole family together.”

He paused. “Look—”

“I didn't think so.” She put the phone back in her pocket and smiled. He wouldn't call anyone. She could mess with him all she wanted. She needed to get upstairs, that was all that mattered; she would say she had to use the bathroom. “What do you want with her anyway? You could do a lot better.”