by Jason Allen
He drove slowly for another block or two, his pulse beating in his neck as he turned left at the pyramid of cannonballs and the antique cannon on the edge of town. A couple blocks later, he downshifted around the bend, rolled to a stop and parked beside a wooded section of Gin Lane. From there he didn’t hesitate at all. He hustled along the grass bordering the roadside, past hedgerows and closed gates and dark driveways, until the Sheffields’ driveway came into view. A life-size pair of stone lions sat atop wide stone bases and bookended the entrance, two males with full manes and the house number chiseled onto their chests. Corey knew the lions held a double meaning. His mom’s boss put these statues out here partly because they looked imposing, the type of decorations kings used to choose, but also because they stood as symbols of August birthdays, the same astrological sign as Mr. Sheffield’s first name—Leo.
He stood still for a moment, looking between the bars of the tall iron gates crowned with spikes. Beginning tomorrow morning, and then all throughout Memorial Day weekend—just as he had the past few summers—he’d spend long days working there. Gina would be so pissed if she could see him now. She’d at least threaten to disown him if she ever found out he’d broken in, but that would be a hollow threat anyway, and he’d already convinced himself that she’d never know. The Sheffields should have paid her more to begin with, even if she didn’t have a deadbeat husband like Ray pissing her meager savings away on his court fees and gambling debts. But the memory that sealed Corey’s decision tonight had been replaying in his mind for almost a year—the dinner party last summer, when Sheila Sheffield yelled at his mom right in front of him and about ten guests, berating her for accidentally dropping a crystal chalice that she said cost more than Gina’s yearly salary. While Leo and the grown Sheffield kids looked on dumbly and didn’t bother to make a peep, Corey had followed Gina into the kitchen and stood a few feet away from her, unable to think of what to say to console her while she cried. Ever since then, he’d wanted to get back at them all.
Fuck these people, he thought.
He would rob them, and smash some windows on his way out so they wouldn’t suspect anyone who worked there. All he had to do was make sure not to leave any evidence behind, definitely no fingerprints, and he’d take the extra precaution of scaling the gates rather than punching in the code.
He wriggled his fingers into his gloves. Crickets chirped away in the shadows, his only witnesses as he looked over each shoulder and back through the bars. He let out a long breath. Then he gripped the wrought iron and started to climb.
Moonlight splintered between the old oak branches and cut across his body like blades. It took only a few seconds to grapple up the bars, though a bit longer to ease over the spear-like tips while he tried to shut out a nightmare image of one of them skewering his crotch. Relieved when his legs reached the other side unharmed, he shimmied down the bars like a monkey and dropped, suddenly hidden from the outside world by the thick hedge wall. Poised on one knee, he turned to his left and scanned the distant mansion’s dark windows, the eaves and gables. The perfectly manicured lawn stretched for acres in all directions, a few giant oaks with thick limbs and gnarled trunks the only natural features between the faraway pines along the property line and a constellation of sculptures. A scattered squad of bronze chess pieces stood as tall as real-life soldiers, with two much larger pieces towering behind them—a three-ton slab of quartz sitting atop a steel column and a bright yellow Keith Haring dog in midstomp on its hind legs, each the size of an upended school bus or the wing of a 747, all the sculptures throwing sharp shadows across the lawn when Corey rose to his feet, leapt forward and ran toward the Sheffields’ sprawling vacation home.
His sneakers crunched along the pebble driveway, his steps way too loud against the quiet until he made it across the deeper bed of beach stones in the wide parking area and passed through an ivy-covered archway, still at top speed while he followed the curved path of slate down a gentle slope, and then pulled up at the corner of the porch. Breathing heavily, he grappled up the post and high-stepped onto the railing, wiping sweat from his forehead when he turned to face Agawam Lake. The moon’s light came ladling down onto the water like milk and trailed into the darkness of the far shore, while in the reeds beside the nearest willow tree a pair of swans sat still as porcelain, sleeping with their bills tucked at their breasts.
No one will know, he thought. The crickets kept making a soft racket in the shadows. The swans seemed like another good omen. But then a light went on inside one of the mansions directly across the water, and Corey pulled his body up from the railing, thinking he should get inside before someone saw him. He quickly scaled the corner porch beam and trellis while trying to avoid the roses’ thorns, even as they snagged his sleeves and pant legs. Then, like a practiced rock climber, in one fluid motion he hoisted himself from the second-story roof up to the third-floor gable. He crouched there, looking, listening. The house across the water with the light on was too far away to know for sure, but he didn’t see any obvious signs of anyone watching from the picture windows. Probably just some insomniac millionaire sipping whiskey and checking the numbers of a stock exchange on the other side of the world.
Confident that he should press on, Corey half stood from his crouch and took the putty knife from his back pocket to pry open the third-story bathroom window, the one he’d left unlatched the previous day when he’d come there with his mother. The old window sash fought him with a friction of wood on wood, but after straining for a few seconds he managed to shove the bottom section flush with the top, and was struck immediately by the smells of Gina’s recent cleaning—ammonia, lemon and jasmine, the chemical blend of a freshly scoured hospital room. Balanced at the angle of the roof, he stared down at the neighboring properties once more. Still no sounds, no lights, no signs that anyone had called the cops, so he turned and stretched his arms through the window and shimmied down until he felt the toilet lid with both gloved hands and his sneakers left the shingles, all his weight sliding against the sill as he wriggled in.
Although he hadn’t been sure whether he’d ever go through with it, he’d plotted this burglary for weeks, the original iteration coming to him during Labor Day weekend last year. The first step had been to ask Gina if he could clean the Sheffield house with her for a few extra bucks before the summer season began. She’d raised an eyebrow but agreed, approving at least of her teenager’s out-of-character desire to work, and throughout the past week, whenever she’d left him to dust and vacuum the third floor, he’d had his chance to run recon and plan the point of entry. He knew she wouldn’t bother to check the latch on a closed window three stories off the ground, not after she’d scrubbed and ironed and Pledged all day. And more important, by then he knew those upper-floor windows had no seal-break sensors. He knew this because a few days earlier he’d left this very same window open before Gina armed the alarm, and afterward nothing happened—no blaring sounds before they pulled away, no call or drive-by from a security officer. So tonight, again, the security company wouldn’t see any flashing red lights on their computer screens. Not yet anyway, not until he smashed a window downstairs and staged a sloppy burglary scene on his way out.
Despite knowing that nobody would be out till Friday, his footsteps were all toe as he crept from the dark bathroom and into the hazy bluish hall, and yet, even with all this effort to tread lightly, the old floorboards still strained and creaked each time his sneakers pressed down. Trailing away from him, a black-and-white series of Ansel Adams photos hung in perfect rows, one on either side of the hall, hundreds of birch trees encased in glass coverings that Corey had just recently Windexed and wiped. Every table surface and light fixture and the entire length of the floor gleamed, immaculate, too clean to imagine the Sheffields had ever even set foot in here, let alone lived here for part of the year. He’d always felt the house had a certain coldness to it, and thought so again now, even though it had to be damn near eighty de
grees inside with all the windows closed.
After slowly stepping down one set of stairs, Corey skulked along the second-floor hall, past the doorway to Mr. and Mrs. Sheffields’ master bedroom and then past Andy’s and Clay’s rooms, deciding to browse Tiffany’s bedroom first, his favorite room in the house. The Sheffields’ only daughter had a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of hardcover novels, stage plays and poetry collections, a Super 8 projector, stacked film reels and three antique cameras. He’d spent as much time as possible in this room during his previous workdays, mainly staring at the paintings mounted on three of the walls, and now lingered once more looking at each textured image, surprised all over again that a rich girl had painted these shades of pain, these somber expressions on the faces of dirty figures in shabby clothes, compositions of suffering he’d have expected from a city artist teetering between a rat-hole apartment and a cardboard box in an alley. They all had something, that’s for sure, but one portrait had always spoken to him much more than any of the others. He stood before it and freed it from its hook.
At the window he noticed the light had gone off at the mansion across the lake and figured the insomniac must have drunk enough for sleep. Although he knew he shouldn’t, he flicked on Tiffany’s bedside table light to get a better look at the girl in the painting, her brown eyes, full lips, caramel skin, her black hair flowing down to divots between her collarbone and chest. He knew Tiffany had painted it, but also that it wasn’t a self-portrait. She looked nothing like the girl she’d painted. Anorexically skinny, Tiffany had dyed-blond hair and usually wore too much makeup. In one photo with her parents and two older brothers, while the rest of the family had dressed in country club attire, she had on a tank top and frayed jean shorts, dark sunglasses, the only one of them with any tattoos, the only one barefoot on the grass.
Corey searched her shelves until he found the photo of Tiffany’s best friend, the girl from the painting, Angelique. He’d seen her at the estate plenty during the previous summers, and last Labor Day weekend they’d talked many times, their conversations lasting longer and seeming to have more depth until finally he summoned the courage to ask her out. Her long pause had made him wish he could disappear, and then those four awful words, I have a boyfriend, had knocked the wind out of him just before he nodded with his eyes to the ground and walked away. Reliving the disappointment, he killed the lamplight and lay on the bed with her photo on his chest, and then, stupidly, closed his eyes.
* * *
Sometime later he snapped awake with his head turned toward the window, disoriented for a moment by the depthless darkness pinpointed by stars. His eyes opened wider as he realized he’d not only been asleep on Tiffany’s bed but had been awakened by the sounds of voices. He sat bolt upright and left the bedsprings creaking, stumbling to replace the painting on its hook and then tiptoeing out into the hall, listening attentively to the ambient noise coming from downstairs—a thud, maybe from the heavy refrigerator door, a few muffled words, drinking glasses clinking against the marble counter. One step toward the stairs and he stopped. The floorboards seemed softer in certain spots. He had to keep moving, so he leaned forward and took the next step as if attempting to navigate a minefield purely by feel. Another creak in the wood followed, but not quite as loud as the last, while the voices, both of them female, sounded closer than they had a minute ago.
He sensed them at the base of the stairs, heading up. If he didn’t slip out of sight in the next few seconds, they’d see him. He’d never been caught before. He’d always been a ghost, a ninja in the shadows—one who would never hurt anybody in the houses he visited. But of course, they would assume otherwise. If they saw him half crouched like this in the dim hallway with his hood up, he’d have no chance to explain that he meant them no harm. Without a doubt, he would scare them in a way he could never apologize for. He could already imagine their screams.
By some miracle he managed to slip under Tiffany Sheffield’s bed just before the girls reached the top of the stairs. He lay there, his gloved hands clenched around the framed photo of Angelique that he hadn’t thought to put back on the shelf, staring wide-eyed at the base of the doorway. Footsteps and Tiffany’s shrill voice filled the hall with echoes. They stepped closer toward the bedroom, about to catch him, about to run off screaming before calling 911. Corey made his promises with his chin against the floor. God, he thought, please get me out of this. Just get me out of this and no more breaking in, I swear. But the voices had already descended upon him, the light flicked on, and the first girl to walk in went clomping past in three-inch wedges. He recognized the swirly pattern tattooed on her ankle from Tiffany’s photos.
At the bookcase she burped and said loudly, “I should really alphabetize these fuckers.”
“Wait on the projects till tomorrow,” the other girl said as she walked in. “Just grab Casablanca.”
“Angel, you beautiful bitch,” Tiffany said. “I love you more than anything.”
“Love you, too, lil’ missy.”
“Yeah, but I love you more. More than fat little beavers love to nibble on branches, or woodpeckers love to peck on a pole, more than Trump loves wearing fucking dryer lint on his head. And another thing, my Portuguese sister—Brad doesn’t deserve you. What he deserves is a raging case of crabs from one of those strippers he likes so much.”
“Jeez, Tiff,” the other girl said, laughing. “You’re a graphic one tonight.”
“You know what you need now? I’ll tell you what you need—you need a real man. Holy shit, yes! You need a Bogie, kid! Like Rick, from the movie!”
“Yeah, well, too bad that’s a fictional guy from an old movie.”
“If I were a man, I’d buy me a white suit and get on my knees and marry you.”
Her friend kept laughing as she answered, “Too bad you’re not my type. That probably would be easier.”
“Where in the—You see that movie anywhere, Angel-face?”
“Seriously, Tiff, why’d you drink so much in the car? That driver thought you were nuts.”
Silence followed and Corey scratched his nose, fearing he might sneeze. If he did, he was dead. No way around it. Totally dead.
“Tiff, you okay? You need to—”
The feet belonging to the Sheffields’ only daughter stumbled out the door, followed by the sound of her puking in the bathroom across the hall. Tiffany’s friend stayed put and sighed, her black sandals no more than a few inches from Corey’s nose. When she stepped away from the bed, Corey couldn’t help himself. He edged closer to the ruffled skirt at the base of the box spring and gazed up from the shadow... There she stood, facing the bookshelf. Angelique. Her black hair streaming down her back, a thin white sweater half off one shoulder, dark blue formfitting jeans, just enough of her profile in view for the strangest sense of peace to envelop him as he slipped silently back under the center of the bed and settled with his chin between his hands, hands against the floor. She lifted one sandal heel and removed something from the shelf, then left the room, calling out, “Tiff, I found Casablanca. You okay?”
The next few minutes passed amid a wash of bustling and moans and stressed floorboards before the overall shrink and fade of sound when the girls descended the stairs. Corey stayed put below Tiffany’s bed awhile longer, listening with his ear cocked toward the door. As soon as he felt convinced that they weren’t on their way back up, he crawled out and tiptoed up the stairs, then climbed out the bathroom window like the survivor of a bad car wreck, once again standing at a steep angle, doing his best not to make any noise while he muscled the window closed.
The moon cast its metallic blue haze over the lake side of the house as he inched his way down the roof and dropped from the third floor to the second and scrabbled down the trellis. His sneakers touched down on the ground with a soft thud. No reason yet to make a beeline for the gate, just stay low and move like a jungle cat along the layer of bark mulch between
the flowerpots and shrubs for the entire length of the porch.
Outside the corner window of the billiard room, where he knew the Sheffields kept their projection screen TV, he rose from a squat until his eyes peeked an inch above the sill and both girls came into view. Safely concealed by reflections from the antique table lamps and images from the movie flashing against the glass, he looked at Angelique sitting sideways on the couch with her hand in a bag of gourmet cookies and Tiffany with her head on her friend’s thigh. His breath began fogging the lower corner of the window, and rather than drawing attention by wiping it away, he sank to his heels to let the evidence of his presence disappear.
With his arms wrapped tightly around his knees, he debated leaving. This felt different from the other break-ins, the pranks, the little rearrangements and refrigerator sabotage. With Angelique, since he didn’t consider her a stranger at all, this felt suddenly more like an invasion, like an accidental violation. For Corey to stick around and watch her through the window struck him as shameful, too close to the kind of pathetic shit that Peeping Toms or stalkers might do when they liked a girl. And besides, he could talk to her again tomorrow, during his first work shift of the weekend, after she and Tiffany and the rest of the Sheffields and their guests settled in to celebrate Memorial Day—but only if neither of them caught him outside the window now. In that case, not only would his chances with Angelique be torpedoed forever, but within the hour a cop would be writing Corey’s physical description on a little pad, and soon after that the Southampton Town Police would be cruising the neighborhood on the lookout for him.
He squinted through the rhododendron branches. The sleeping pair of swans beside the glimmering lake water was still a good omen. As long as he stuck to his usual code of invisibility and silence on his way out, he’d be all right. He couldn’t bring himself to leave yet, though, because Tiffany was talking about Angelique’s ex-boyfriend again. Raising his head closer to the windowpanes, he heard Tiffany repeat what she’d said upstairs, that she and Angelique both needed to find a Humphrey Bogie of their own. And then between yawns she added, “Angelic one, could you pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top open up one of those windows? It’s hotter than a monkey’s butt in here.”
