rivka

I had just finished reading Alex a bedtime story. I crossed over to the study and sat down to write an e-mail, when I heard Michael say sharply: "Rebecca, I need you down here."

His tone made me stop typing in mid-word. I ran down the steps. He met me at the bottom. "The police are here; someone has reported a burglary in progress at our address. Colin is on the changing table." Then he disappeared.

I found Colin (abandoned halfway through a dirty diaper change) and got him cleaned up and dressed. The seldom-used front door was standing wide open, and a police officer stood in our garden shining his flashlight carefully over every inch of the front of the house. I heard a helicopter overhead. I got the officer's permission to close and lock the door and the tall iron gate that protects it.

The side door - the one we actually use; here's a picture of the layout if you're confused - was standing open. I found Michael at the back of the house, by the open kitchen door. He was leaning out the door talking to the police officers searching our back yard. He asked me, firmly, to take Colin upstairs to the study. As we were on our way up, the cops pronounced the yard clear and left.

Michael's story: He heard a couple of odd noises that sounded like something might have been knocked over by the wind. He checked the back door (which he found we had accidentally left unlocked) and then, after another strange sound, went to look out the front window. There was a scruffy man who looked homeless standing outside our gate, which was ajar. When the guy saw Michael looking at him, he left. Michael and Colin sat back down to watch the baseball game, until (a) Colin needed to be changed, and (b) Michael noticed several officers with flashlights in the garden, and one of them came up to knock on the door.

It appears that the sound Michael heard was someone trying to get in through the solid metal gate that shuts off the back of the house. The garbage can normally stands in front of that gate, and it had been moved out into the passage. We think the guy tried the gate, found it locked, and decided not to try to get over it. Michael saw him on his way out.

He may or may not have tried the metal gate that covers the front door. It was slightly bowed out when the cops checked it - there's a little bit of play where the two halves come together, even when it's locked. The wind could have moved it, or.

Here's what bothers me most: the lights were on in the living room and study. Michael had the TV on, too. He was moving around on the first floor. And the guy still tried to come in. It frightens me that he wasn't deterred by the house being occupied. I'm afraid he may have had a home invasion in mind rather than a burglary.

Very grateful that we have bars or heavy metal mesh on all the downstairs windows.

It was Alex's bedtime. Michael and I got her into pajamas and brushed her teeth. Then Michael went downstairs and I read stories. Alex jumped out of bed to turn out the light all by herself. I reached down to turn on her lullabye CD.

The CD player wasn't there.

Ludicrously, I looked under the bed and even under a baby blanket lying on the floor, as if somehow a portable CD player could get up and walk. I called for Michael. He looked at the blank place on the floor and agreed that, yes, the CD player was gone.

As soon as I could detach from Alex I walked through the house. Nothing seemed out of place in our bedroom, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Michael checked the third floor and the basement. Nothing unusual. Our computers were untouched. The TV, DVD player, TiVO box, VCR, living room CD player, and all our CDs were intact. On my desk in the dining room, under some papers, my checkbook and my iPod lay undisturbed. In the bedroom, Michael's ceramic jar of coins was untouched. Several bottles of very expensive whisky remained prominently displayed in the corner cabinet of the dining room.

And yet, we were clearly the victims of a burglary. There is no other explanation.

Michael said that when he'd come home from work the door had been unlocked. (Since nothing seemed out of place, it slipped his mind until the CD player was missing; he's still not totally sure that he didn't just turn the key wrong, and unlock it without realizing it.) I know I locked the door when I left this morning. (Locking the door while carrying my work things and Alex's nursery school things is enough of a production that it doesn't slip one's mind.) Our bedroom window was closed but unlocked - there have been a few cooler nights this week, so we've had the windows open instead of using the air conditioner.

I think what must have happened is that someone accessed our bedroom window from the second-floor balcony. Our next-door neighbor was planning to have roofers in this week; it's possible that a ladder was left unattended. I think they walked through the upstairs, grabbed the CD player, went downstairs, and left through the door. They can't have spent very much time in our house, or other things would be missing.

What a weird thing to have happen. Honestly, it hasn't even really sunk in. Michael is incredibly jumpy, going over and over the house to check things. (And I checked in the closet and wardrobe in Alex's room before I left her.) I just feel... I don't know. I mean, we must have been burgled. And yet it seems so surreal, that a $30 CD player would be taken and nothing else, that someone was here and yet the house looks normal and undisturbed.

We haven't bothered to call the police. It seems like there's no point. I e-mailed the neighbor to ask if the roofers had been here with ladders, and we'll check with our neighbors on the other side tomorrow to see if they saw or heard anything. Although I think they'd have been over here immediately, telling us, if they had.

This is so... yeesh. This is just weird.

I just called the cops on the neighbors again.[1]

Our landlord came by a couple of weeks ago to take down the windowboxes, because painters were coming. He told us that one of the neighbors was moving out of state, and that the other one wanted to renew the lease in her own name. Did we think that would be a problem?

No, we stupidly said. If they're separating, that should take care of it.

Meanwhile, they kept fighting - mostly late at night and early in the morning - and we kept hearing them. But it never crossed the "I have to call the police now" line, so I just gritted my teeth and waited.

Tonight the screaming argument started around 6:45, as Michael was leaving for a church Board meeting and I was taking Alex upstairs for her bath. They were still at it when I brought her downstairs, and worse - there was an awful, shuddering wailing. I heard... things... being slammed around.

"The wild things roared their terrible roars, and gnashed their terrible teeth!" I read to Alex, raising my voice so that she wouldn't hear the crying. Except that, really, I was trying to block it out for myself. She didn't seem to notice.

"...and into the night of his very own room, where he found his supper waiting for him. And it was still hot. Okay, Mama needs to make a phone call now."

9-1-1, I punched with shaking fingers. I told the dispatchers that my neighbors were having what seemed to be a violent fight. Weapons? she asked me. I told her no, I didn't think so, but that there was a history of domestic violence.

Then I sat down and read Alex another story, every nerve in my body tensed to see flashing lights outside the window. She wanted more books, but instead I hauled her upstairs. Fortunately, she didn't want a long bedtime routine. "Alex crib," she suggested as soon as we entered her room, and I was happy to comply.

This time the cop stayed a while. It sounded like one of the neighbors came out on the street to argue with him at length about whether or not the other one was going to come out and talk to him too - I heard him say "Well, her story might be different from your story, and that might be different from upstairs' story. I'm just doing my job." He knocked on my door at one point to ask me to repeat exactly what I'd heard, and I think that one of them was in the street while he did it - so if we ever had even a thin veneer of confidentiality to these complaints, that's certainly gone now.

He left without arresting anyone. I called the landlords. I am feeling awfully jumpy about being in the house alone. I hate that we have a blind front door - no peephole, and no overlooking window. I just bewildered the hell out of someone from the O'Malley campaign who'd come to drop off a sign for our railing, because I insisted that he shout his identification and purpose through the door.

This afternoon at work I found myself oddly tense - shoulders hunched, back aching, anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach. And then I realized why: some women a couple of offices down were having a loud, cheerful conversation. Hearing muffled raised voices of African-American women was sending me over the edge into a fight-or-flight response.

I just can't take much more of this.


[1] Backstory 1, 2, 3.

I thought about making this post last night. If I had, it would've been very different.

Here's what I would have written then:

Something needs to be done about our downstairs neighbors. They've just had a screaming, door-slamming fight at the tops of their lungs - sounds like they're moving back and forth from their apartment to the sidewalk in front of the house. I'd like to say that this is an isolated incident, but the only real difference from the status quo is that this time they're louder. We hear them fighting almost every day - usually early in the morning or late at night. Sometimes loud sex, too, but it's the fighting that bothers me.

About a year ago, I guess, I called the cops on them. It was early on a Saturday morning. I heard angry yelling, and then the unmistakable sound of a body falling heavily against furniture. I dialed 911 and told them I thought I was hearing domestic violence downstairs, and then sat around shaking, waiting for the fallout. An hour or so later, one of the downstairs neighbors came up to apologize. She told me that they had some friends visiting, and had been out all night partying. One of their friends was "drunk and stupid," and while they were trying to get him calmed down he fell over some boxes. She talked about neighborly respect and sounded as though she thought I had made a glorified noise complaint; I explained that I didn't care if they got loud, and only intervened because I thought someone was being hurt. At the time, the whole conversation seemed plausible enough.

But the fighting is getting worse and worse. It's very audible from our house. (We have the three-story main house, and the basement is a separate studio apartment.) I've never had to deal with neighbor noise like this before - parties or loud music, sure, but not vicious shouting, day after day. It's really upsetting me. And I don't want Alex exposed to it, either.

I'm not sure what can be done about it, though. We really don't know them at all - just in a "here, this letter got delivered to the wrong box" sort of way. In the midst of the door slamming last night, I wanted to go out and tell them to shut the hell up, but I was afraid. I've thought about leaving a letter in their mailbox, letting them know how much they're disturbing us. I've thought about complaining to the landlord. Calling the police again doesn't seem likely to do any good. I don't want to keep living like this, but I don't know how to make it stop.

What happened today:

The worst fight yet. I heard them clearly from the second floor, two floors away from them. Michael and Alex were driven in from playing in the backyard - it must have been practically like being right there in the basement apartment with them. All three of us fled the house together, and once we were outside, Michael told me that he'd heard one of them screaming that she didn't intend to let herself be hit anymore.

Shit.

We don't know which one of them it was. They're both women, so we can't go by either the voice or the statistical probabilities. If we did know who it was, our course would be simple: find a way to tell the victim that we know what's happening, and offer our help if she wants to leave or needs a safe place quickly during an argument. Call the cops the next time we hear anything. But we don't know, and making contact with the wrong person could have negative consequences for the victim.

We can still call the police if we hear anything suggestive - or just on general principles, when the fights get loud. But if the cops get there and our neighbors insist that everything's fine, they can't do anything.

I feel like I have the responsibility to do something to make it stop. I just don't know what that thing could be. In the meantime, of course it make hearing them fight much, much more awful. What a nightmare.