And we have and we are.
How great is that?
We’re en route home when I ask Joanna to Google map us a way to get to a Starbucks around Schererville.
Once we have our drinks, we drive in silence for a while, no sound but that of an iPhone playlist I know Joanna likes.
Apropos of nothing she says, “I’m going to do it.”
I glance over at her. “Do what?”
“California. I’m letting Anna spend the summer out there.”
“Yay!” I cheer. “This will be so fun for her. And we can visit.”
She nods and says nothing, looking at the empty fields where stalks of corn will soon flourish. This had to be a hard decision, and the choice she’s making is completely selfless. There’s no upside for her in letting Anna go, in giving up her peace of mind in always knowing where her daughter is, what she’s doing, and who she’s with. Joanna was so looking forward to having Anna home this summer. The kid’s such a sunny presence, with a wicked sense of humor. She’s always willing to help and she’s especially sweet and loving with her younger sister.
Joanna and her husband Michael have worked so hard to raise this intelligent, independent young woman, one who’d have the confidence and ability to leave the nest.
And that’s exactly what they’ve gotten.
That realization must be bittersweet.
I tab through my playlist until I find the right song to mark occasion. Fountains of Wayne claim that it’s Stacy’s mom who’s got it going on.
I disagree. In my opinion, it’s Anna’s.
Fourteen
Who’s Afraid Of The Dark?
“If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
- Dale Carnegie
“Are you in the house alone?”
I cower here in bed, frozen in panic that my phone will ring and a menacing voice on the other end of the line will ask me the question I’ve dreaded for most of my life.
“Are you in the house alone?”
Because I am in the house alone. I fear that he knows this.
[Why is it always a he in my imagination? This is inadvertent gender bias. Not cool. Ladies can be murderers, too. What about Aileen Wuornos? Or Belle Gunness? Or Velma Barfield? They didn’t just slaughter a person, they slaughtered multiple people. They were legit serial killers!]
[Wait, why am I so well-versed in female serial killers?]
He has my number. He’s biding his time before he calls.
Fletch, my husband, my protector, my own personal Secret Service agent, is across the country on business. There’s no one here but me, a lonesome figure huddled in the darkness.
Sure, I have a whole pack of scary dogs who, in theory, could scare off intruders, but they’re even bigger babies than me. For crying out loud, Hambone’s terrified when I cook meat on the stove. She runs to hide. Yes, she gets a little snarly when she sees the FedEx guy, but if he broke in and fried up some bacon? Forget it. Game over.
Hazy moonlight casts ominous shadows on the long drive leading up to the house. My home is ensconced by trees and bracketed by a nature preserve. The woods are deep around me... providing so damn many places for monsters and aliens to hide.
Thanks for that, Stranger Things.
As if I wasn’t already neurotic enough.
Our residence is set far back from the main road, shielded from the sight and sound of other homes in the vicinity. These properties are distant oases, their wan pools of light barely breaching the wood line. Whenever Fletch is here, all this privacy is a totally selling point, especially if we were “naked people,” which we are not.
[Perhaps you’ve gathered this already.]
We moved to from the city to the suburbs to avoid that which perpetually violated our peace. We were so very over Chicago’s constant twilight, where the nights never quite darkened, where blackout curtains barely dimmed the bedroom. And do not start me on the noise pollution.
With open windows, we heard every flush of nearby toilets, the drone of a dozen different televisions, the scrape of steak knife against dinner plate as the feuding couple next door consumed their meals in angry silence in the days before she finally left him, taking the Labradoodle with all his personalized, embroidered sweatshirts.
The last thing we wanted was to see or hear those people.
Okay, that’s a lie.
At first, Fletch and I both turned into Gladys Kravitz when they squabbled with each other. “See?” he’d say to me. “I always put the seat back down!” Then I would chime in with, “And I would never leave you less than a whole serving of milk in the carton!” Then we’d congratulate each other for winning at the competitive sport of being the better couple than the people who lived next to us.
As things devolved, we were more and more uncomfortable with our front-row seat at their unraveling marriage. We were an unwilling audience, trapped by proximity. We bought this place to be out of neighbors’ earshot.
Yet now I realize we’re too far away for anyone to hear me scream.
Motherfucker.
“Are you in the house alone?”
My heart pounds with such force that my pulse throbs in my ears. A steel band of terror constricts my lungs and I can barely catch my breath. The taste of fear is bitter on my tongue. My palms are damp as I wrap the blanket around me. I cling to it, as though the thin cotton could protect me, could keep me safe. I close my eyes, but I know sleep won’t come.
I lay here, awake, alert, awash in terror.
And I wait for the phone to ring.
Full disclosure?
Nothing happens to me while Fletch is away in Boston. Or in Las Vegas. Or Dallas. Or the handful of other places he’s traveled in the past few years for business or boys’ weekends. I’ve never had an incident; no terrifying precedent has ever been set.
No one’s called to ask me if I’m in the house alone. In fact, on this last trip, the phone doesn’t even ring. Of course, that’s because the twenty-year IT industry veteran in the house, the guy who’s designed millions of dollars’ worth of telecom infrastructures for Fortune 50 organizations, installed a new cable jack in the bedroom a few months ago and now all our calls go straight to voicemail.
Fletch claims that he was working with CAT-5 wire and never touched the basement phone lines, so the malfunction can’t be his fault. I claim that when he went downstairs to monkey with the wiring, our landline worked, and, when he came back up, it didn’t.
Do the math.
Also, even if the raspy-voiced murderer tries to hit me on my cell phone instead, I won’t hear it; I never un-muted my ringer after one too many robo-dialed election calls. Plus, there’s almost no scenario that entails me talking on the phone in the first place, particularly to anyone at a number I don’t recognize.
Decline. Block. Done.
Still, I’m in full-on, bitch-panic mode about unwanted calls from the second the sun sets whenever he’s gone.
Which makes no sense to anyone, especially me.
The irony here is that the dialogue from the Are You in the House Alone made-for-TV movie that’s scared me since its debut in 1978 wasn’t even about murder. Instead, the heroine was being secretly harassed by her classmate, a pink-cheeked, teenage Dennis Quaid. And, despite his poly bell-bottoms and propensity for acquaintance rape, Dennis Quaid wasn’t spoiling to kill anyone.
The problem is that I’ve conflated this stupid movie with every other terrifying film I saw/book I read during my formative years. The phrase “Are you in the house alone?” has become emblematic shorthand for all the media that scared me growing up. In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, no one made entertainment geared towards middle graders.
Why is that, I wonder?
Were authors too concerned with the Cold War? Did producers assume that twelve-year-olds didn’t have discretionary income to spend on movies? Personally, I was babysitting four nights a week back then, so I was makin’ it rain, a dollar an
hour at a time.
For whatever reason, today’s flourishing Young Adult market had yet to exist. Like the rest of my peers, I went straight from Clifford the Big Red Dog to Cujo. That’s like swapping out aspirin for heroin, or going from holding hands to reverse cowgirl.
[I refuse to Google “reverse cowgirl,” so I’m not one hundred percent clear on what it means. In my head, it involves spurs and a saddle.]
Generation X ‘tweens didn’t have Harry Potter; we had Halloween. We swam out of the kiddie pool and straight into the Marianas Trench. That’s why it’s not my fault that I’m afraid of the dark.
This is all on you, Jamie Lee Curtis.
Every scary movie was rated-R back then, so I wasn’t old enough to see them in the theater. However, my father had the first video disc/VCR set-up in town, [read: he was the first video pirate] so we had an extensive horror collection.
Dad duped video discs from Friday night to Monday morning, every single week, building his library. We had everything. My folks would never allow me to buy a ticket for something psyche-scarring. But watching slasher flicks in the privacy of our own family room? If free, I take! Such was the impact these films had on me, I spent a good chunk of adolescence assuming that blonde hair + big boobs + shower = inevitable stabbing.
I took a lot of baths back then.
No matter how old I am now, I will never not freak out over the “ki ki ki, ha ha ha” score that used to play when Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees would stalk his victims. To this day, I eschew both summer camps and hockey masks. And despite Ms. Curtis not being in this flick, I avoid Activia.
Because I can never be too sure.
Still, I knew the situations in these books and movies were fictional, so why do I let my home-alone fear impact me now? While I’m far from intrepid in the rest of my life, I’m comfortable with plenty of phobias that make others break out into terror-sweat. For example, I’ve been interviewed on national TV without issue. In fact, I held my own with Charlie Rose who was deeply dismayed to hear that my book The Best of Enemies was not about the Nixon-Frost debates, like, at all.
I hate being afraid of what might be lurking in the dark outside my front door, which is why I sleep so badly when Fletch travels. I did finally drift off this time, but it took a glass of wine, a Benadryl, then a Xanax, and, eventually, an Ambien.
Fletch says my falling asleep isn’t nearly as surprising as my waking up.
I want to learn to deal with this fear.
My only comfort is knowing that a potential murder’s calls will never come from inside the house... because the phone line’s still not fixed.
“Why are you here?”
I’ve been listening to everyone else’s answers as we’ve gone around the room, explaining our rationale for joining Lake Forest’s Citizens Police Academy. Fletch has been on me about doing this with him for years and I finally ran out of excuses as to why I couldn’t.
He made the point that knowledge is power. He said the more I learn about what I have/don’t have to be afraid of when I’m by myself, the better I’ll feel. I couldn’t argue that logic, so that’s why I’m spending the next ten weeks in cop school.
Our class includes twelve other citizens. Their reasons for participation vary. Some are involved in community government and they want to inform themselves about the law enforcement arm. Another woman lives alone and would like to learn to shoot. There’s a husband and wife couple who have friends who’d taken the course and heard it was fascinating. One older gentleman has an adult son who had two cars stolen from his driveway here in town. He’s interested in what he might do to prevent future crimes.
Officer Instructor [pseudonym] is very kind when he talks about having been on that case. The son had left both cars unlocked, with the keys in plain sight. The cars – both newer model luxury cars – were stolen, but quickly abandoned when the car thieves found two brand new Mercedes unlocked, with the keys inside, a few blocks away. The sons’ vehicles (also Mercedes) were a few years old, and, thus, less desirable.
Apparently, this happens here all the time.
Who are these people?
No, not the criminals, I’m talking about the people who go so blithely through life that they’re completely oblivious to any bad thing that could ever happen.
I want to be one of them.
Sign me up, please. I’m tired of hiding under the covers when I’m alone at night, terrified of every creak and gust of wind. Their way of life sounds a lot happier.
Officer Instructor smiles at me, waiting for my answer.
I consider making up something that sounds cool, but ultimately, I tell him the truth. I figure he’s a cop, he’ll know if I’m lying.
I simply shrug and say, “I’m here because I’m nosy.”
Every Wednesday night after class, I apologize to Fletch, telling him how sorry I am that we didn’t do this sooner. Over the thirty-plus hours of coursework, we’re learning every aspect of how the local PD operates. Each unit is more interesting than whatever we learned about the previous week, from hiring procedures to evidence gathering to undercover drug investigations.
Fletch is right, the more I know, the more I’m able to relax in my own house. We’re doing things right. We’re observant. We’re careful. We have an alarm and we set it. (So many people fail to take this crucial step, we learn.) We have big, loud dogs, which are the greatest deterrent of all. And if we were to ever happen to be fortunate enough to own two brand new Mercedes, we would definitely not leave them in the driveway with the windows open and the keys inside.
These seem like simple steps, don’t they? Like the common sense you’d learn in grade school.
There’s one woman in the class who’s a pathological hand-raiser. She first came to my attention when she lectured the officers about how it’s their duty to tell people to lock their houses, because she does not think these are simple steps or common sense.
This lady’s always chiming in on something. Fletch and I had to start sitting in the front row so my inadvertent eye rolls wouldn’t be so obvious. At first, she wasn’t so bad, but as the weeks have progressed, she’s gotten more and more obnoxious. She keeps arguing with the officers about the laws, saying, “No, no, you have it wrong, the law isn’t X, it’s Y.” And then the officers, who are all so polite, will disagree, saying, “No, that’s incorrect. In fact, when we were in court last week...” and then they’ll go on to explain how the law as they know/have been applying it, secured a conviction.
And she’ll still disagree.
By the way?
She’s not an attorney; she’s a Girl Scout leader.
Before the CPA started, I’d suspected that nothing ever happened in Lake Forest. This town was recently recognized as the safest in the state for this exact reason. And that’s why my home-alone-in-the-woods fear feels so irrational.
However, while major crimes are infrequent, I’ve learned they do happen here. The town’s bisected by the artery that connects Chicago and Milwaukee, so all the drug traffic going from point A to point B passes by us. There are some deeply gang-infested areas due north, too, so we are less Mayberry than I anticipated. But this isn’t a fear that has to keep me up at night.
While Lake Forest did have a homicide seventeen years ago, it was a domestic disturbance. Before that, the last gun discharge happened in 1981. Given the law of averages, I will likely be okay here the six or seven nights a year when Fletch is out of town. So, he was right – knowledge does make me feel better.
My assessment is that the scariest thing in this town is to be the parent of a teenager. Because I’m writing Young Adult books now, I’m familiar with some of the problems, like rampant opioid abuse. We also have abnormally high instances of teen suicide. My novel The Gatekeepers is a fictionalization of a suicide cluster that happened up here in 2012. I wrote this book because I learned that local kids are under so much pressure to perform that they’re cracking.
Which puts my scary-noise-i
n-the-woods fears into perspective.
On top of that, thanks to technology, teens have almost unlimited access to drugs and everything can be consumed in vape form now. Plus, vapes can be made to look like a thumbnail drive; this item could literally sit on a kid’s desk and parents would be none the wiser. There’s a big trend on YouTube called “ghosting” where teens film themselves consuming illegal substances via vape pen in class. Like, high school class, not college. I can’t imagine having balls like that as a high schooler. One day in 1983, I wore a shirt were the sleeves were so capped it almost looked sleeveless. I spent the day on the verge of puking because I thought I was going to get expelled for breaking dress code.
Complicating matters further, teens are becoming accidental pornographers. If your kid participates in sexting, that’s considered child pornography under the law. If your daughter sends someone provocative pictures, she’s considered a pornographer. If your son forwards them, then he’s pornographer. Depending on the circumstances, the judges, the quality of legal defense, etc. these kids could end up on a sex registry database. I’m guessing that would hurt their chances of getting into Cornell.
For one stupid, impulsive decision.
The police tell us that parents think they’re on top of this stuff, even the most diligent. Unfortunately, their kids are technologically one step ahead, by doing stuff like hiding the evidence in photo vaults disguised as innocuous apps like calculators.
[The great irony here is, in some small way, my Sunday school teacher might have been to something.]
This is the kind of stuff that scares me now. I can see how foolish I’ve been with my indefinable flights of fancy, how much energy I’ve wasted on nonsense.
Stories I'd Tell in Bars Page 20