Their neighborhood is not the best, or at least there are more desirable ones to inhabit in Scranton. Jim’s memories of this house, which then sat between the Fletchers’ and Mrs. Bernstein’s, come back to him like 1970s home movies: hazy, always sunny or snowy and permanently somebody’s birthday. But the inhabitants of those houses that touch theirs have moved, and when his Dad signs the papers to put the house in his name, he mentions that there have been some break-ins recently, one where the Fletchers used to live, another up the block.
Two days after they’ve completely moved in, abandoning his old apartment, the sirens blast past in hot pursuit of some fool wanting to hide from his sins in the depth of the nearby quarry. They don’t worry until after a month it seems apparent that this kind of event is all too common, but she just sighs and points out that this isn’t New York City.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she whispers as they watch a cop handcuff a guy across the street; he suggests they get a dog.
Late September is cool this year; fall acting in penance for an excruciating summer. They spend their weekends writing Thank-You Notes to their wedding guests or at flea markets bargaining for trinkets to decorate the nursery. In their domestic state they feel safe, wrapped up as they are in the changes in their lives. Everyone knows at work now, thanks to the juxtaposition of Dwight’s menstrual chart and a shotgun wedding, and her mom calls almost everyday to talk babies.
The house is almost finished, they’ve ripped it apart and put back together to their liking, and it now stands as testament to their taste and desires. Pam calls it her most ambitious art project, until the baby comes along. The flowers in the front yard grow of their own accord, where Jim’s grandmother had planted them on any number of her long summer visits, before she’d died in 2000 and he’s learning to take care of them.
One Sunday night, they turn off the lights at 11pm, and he sleeps deeply until he’s prodded awake at 3 hours later.
“There’s someone in the house,” she whispers, her face deadly serious. He’s awake immediately, his heart racing.
“You heard something?”
“I think it was in the kitchen”. She’s solemn, unsure, and its all he needs to pluck up the courage to roll out of bed, pull on a sweatshirt and wish that he kept a baseball bat in their closet. He creeps towards the door and she flinches when it creaks as he slowly pulls it open. Looking downstairs he can definitely see the glow of a cell phone.
“I’ll go check it out,” he whispers. His mouth is dry, his palms sweaty but he keeps it together for her, “call the police.”
“Okay,” she sounds like she might cry. “Be careful.”
He doesn’t turn the light on in the hallway as he slowly walks out of the fortress that is their bedroom. He looks back at Pam who is shakily dialing the phone at her bedside, and nods earnestly, trying to calm her. He searches his mind for the right thing to do, whether to wait for the cops or let whoever it is potentially walk away with their stuff, and while logic tells him that their possessions are not important, he breathes fury at the thought of some stranger touching his things, her things. So he creeps down the stairs, finding the golf club he’s left leaning against the banisters, and he can hear the blood pumping in his ears as he rounds the corner to the kitchen and finds the light switch.
If this had been any other moment, the absurdity of his appearance, barefooted, dressed only in a baggy sweater and boxer shorts, heralding the skinny end of a 9-iron above his head, would have made him laugh or at least aware of his lack of cool. But there’s a teenaged boy standing in the center of his kitchen and it doesn’t matter how he looks. He can’t be more than 19, and as he turns towards the light his squinting eyes don’t hide the dilated pupils of a kid out of control. The kitchen is a mess, the draws pulled open, their contents strewn haphazardly on their new floor tiles.
They stand in silence for a moment, both surprised to be meeting each other at this time in the morning, unprepared for this tense exchange. The guy has his hood pulled up over dark red hair, and Jim notices his tight jeans and sneakers are caked with mud. They stand frozen, and he hears the rain outside over his own heavy breathing.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
He hears his own words as though he were some movie character reading from a screenplay, and just as cinematically the guy grabs randomly from the pile of things of value that he’s created, oddly organized, and makes a dash for the door. Jim is ready to let him go, until he recognizes his battered SLR camera as it’s shoved into large pockets, the one he’s been using to capture the last few weeks of Pam’s burgeoning stomach. It’s not digital and Pam often laughs at him for being ‘old-school’, but he finds a weird authenticity in it. It’s worthless, but it’s has his life inside it and before he knows it he’s dropped the golf club and hurtling out the door after it.
The guy runs around the outside of the house onto the street and like every other sucker he heads towards to the quarry. It’s funny, because Jim sometimes jogs in this direction, (though he’s normally wearing shoes), and despite the lack of an iPod (which he fears may also be in the kid’s pockets), he can still hear the Chemical Brothers and for a second he’s inside Run Lola, Run. He doesn’t see Pam’s form in their bedroom window or hear her yell for him to leave it or even the sirens of the cop car that has turned into their block.
Running in bare feet does not serve him well and by the time they’ve rounded the corner the intruder has a good 30 meters head start. Jim’s feet are killing him, as they batter the wet, uneven pavement he’s close to falling several times. They continue on for another block before the cops catch up, having been pointed in the direction by his panicked wife. They pull the car in front of the perp and block his way and Jim collapses in a heap on the hard ground as he watches them raise their guns and pause the kid indefinitely.
The next hour passes in a blur of statements and forensics, as dozens more strangers intrude on his space. He knows that they are just doing their job but all he wants to do is shut them out and reclaim this place for his family. They tell him anything that’s missing is now evidence until further notice and he feels nauseous at the loss.
When everyone finally leaves it’s 3:17 am, and neither of them feel like sleeping. They stand behind the closed front door for a good ten minutes, his arms pulling her towards him with a new kind of urgency. When he pulls back he’s shocked at the deep grey bags under her bloodshot eyes, professing both exhaustion and kind of wired energy that he is sure is reflected in his appearance.
So they sit, still tense, and watch infomercials for close to an hour before they drift into awkward sleep, propped up uncomfortably just waiting out the rest of the night. He dreams about those 10 minutes over and over, but each time things alter slightly. She comes down with him or the intruder has a gun, and every time Jim can do nothing but stand in horror and watch his life fall apart.
When he wakes it’s morning and he panics when she’s not next to him and there’s a noise in the kitchen. He finds her desperately scrubbing the countertop, though there’s nothing unclean about it, in fact the place much looks tidier than it had when they had gone to bed the night before. For some reason she looks a lot more pregnant to him now than she had a few hours earlier, and he’s not sure if it’s not all in his mind, this new vulnerability.
“I think it’s clean.” he tries for light-hearted but fails, leaning against the doorframe to take the pressure off his battered soles. She looks up at him with an odd expression, her eyes wide yet unreadable.
“I just wanted…to put it all back,” it’s a strangely obvious statement but it means more than it’s total parts.
“It looks exactly like it always has.”
She looks at him strangely again.
“What?”
“I felt the baby move.”
“You did?”
“About an hour ago. It woke me up,” she starts to look a little excited.
Despite everything he grins, a wide grin that he saves for this kind of exhilaration and there’s nothing hollow in this odd victory.
“Awesome,” is the only word for it and he truly means it. “Have you felt it since?” he asks, rushes towards her, placing a hand on the swell of her abdomen, though he won’t feel it himself for a while.
“A couple of times” she nods, “which is good because otherwise I might have thought I imagined it.”
Her eyes are smiling now and this moment trumps the last.
“Holy shit, there’s a baby in there!”
“Yep,” she mummers against his lips and he can feel her smile on his.
That night, after they’ve endured the weird sympathies of their co-workers for eight hours on minimal sleep, they drive to Home Depot and invest in new locks. He checks them a dozen times before they go upstairs to bed and watches her hide her laptop under the couch ,just in case. He realizes that it is going to take them a while to feel completely safe again.
Strangely though he still sleeps well, and not just because he can barely see straight he’s so tired, but because he’s grateful that the intruder was unsuccessful in ripping their home apart. He knows that there’s a lot to come that he won’t be able to control, but he feels safe in the knowledge that whatever happens they’ll try to build their home back up, just as they have been blindly building their lives so far, one piece at a time. That picture in his mind, their home, will change and adapt and their memories of this day will prioritize the first kick, not the break-in. He doesn’t need to fill this house with anything else, because he’s already full.
