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Burglary | Sep 25 2005

I was the one to find the back door open. We had just returned from the swim club, and at first I thought my brother had forgotten to shut the door. Then I saw the glass on the rug and the broken window.

When the policeman came, my mother told me and my brother to go outside and play. Instead of playing, we sat on the curb and stared at the police car in front of our house. There had never been a police car in front of anyone’s house. My friend Richard came over and asked why the police car was there, so I told him. He seemed impressed. I added that the burglars had thrown all the drawers on the floor.

That night my brother woke me to say he’d heard strangers in the house. I told him this wasn’t true, but he insisted I go downstairs and check. There wasn’t anyone there. This same scene was repeated, night after night, for several weeks. I would be asleep in my room and my brother would come in and say he’d heard strangers in the house. “But there aren’t,” I would say, and he’d say, “No, I heard them.” I’d remind him of all the other times he supposedly heard them, and he’d say, “I really heard them this time.”

Then one night it was over. My brother stopped waking me. It was as though it never happened.

Years later, I’ve forgotten the circumstance now, my mother confessed to the crime. We were destitute at the time—my father had stopped providing child support—so my mother staged the burglary to collect the insurance money. Her boyfriend helped her do it.

I remember him. His name was Phil and he had a lot of body hair. I liked him best of all my mother’s boyfriends, then or ever. He was nice without being phony.

I asked my mother if she’d told my brother yet, and she sort of looked at her hands. It turns out she told my brother when we were kids. She had no choice. Before waking me, he would wake her, and she’d be the one to walk through the house in the dark. Afterwards, she would lie in bed and listen as he crept down the hall and opened the door to my room.