Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [21]
I walked into the hallway and saw the door to Madeline’s future room wide open. I could feel the cool air of the Los Angeles winter evening blowing down the hallway. Our bedroom looked like something out of a bad TV movie: the drawers were pulled from the dressers and everything had been dumped out. I looked toward the open French doors at the back of our bedroom, the white curtains billowing inward. I was in a daze.
“Matt! Come here!”
Liz was at the porch railing looking through the grapevine that runs up the trellis attached to our house. With her hand on her hips like any good mother about to scold her child, I heard her yell, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” A little blonde woman, not quite five feet tall and more than halfway through her pregnancy, standing there yelling at the two men who had just ransacked our home.
Since we had surprised them mid-burgle, they easily went out through the back door. But they exited into our fenced-in yard, which appeared to be a problem for them, since their getaway car was parked directly in front of our house—their only route to freedom was through our side yard, right past the spot where Liz was standing. I think we were all a little surprised by their nonchalance as they strolled around the house.
“Get the fuck in the house!” I shouted at Liz. My fear evaporated and I bolted into action, running down the stairs and using my BlackBerry to type out their license plate number while Tom called 911. The dispatcher assured us that the police were on their way, so we went inside to figure out exactly what was missing. There were some obvious things: my cameras, Liz’s laptop, and a few other small electronic items. They had been out in the open and easy to grab. As I dug through the mess in our office, I heard Liz’s voice from the bedroom. “They got all of my jewelry.”
My chin hit my chest and a wave of sickness came over me. I swallowed hard to keep the vomit from coming up, and I walked toward my wife. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the pile of clothes on the floor. All of the jewelry I’d purchased for her piece by piece for nearly every holiday since we’d been together—twelve years’ worth of memories—was now gone.
“Babe, I’m so sorry. I’ll replace it all, even if it takes me another twelve years. I promise.”
“It’s okay. It’s not the jewelry. It’s the reminders of the times and places.”
“We’ll always have those, but I’ll still replace everything.”
The LAPD arrived, and the officer in charge busied himself with his investigation. “We’ll send someone out to fingerprint the house in the morning,” he told us. “Try not to touch anything.”
“What are the chances you’ll catch these guys?” All I could think about was Liz’s jewelry. Sure, I might enjoy replacing those cameras, but to Liz, the missing pieces were not about precious metal and stones.
“We’ll do our best, but Los Angeles is a big city and there’s a lot of crime.”
In other words: Forget about your shit. It’s gone forever.
“Fuck, I can’t believe this,” I yelled, as the officer drove off in the same direction the burglars had gone just an hour earlier. Liz was standing next to me on the sidewalk, her shirt slightly pulled up and exposing a couple of inches of skin, her hands on her lower back, holding the pain of her pregnancy.
“Matt. It’s only stuff. None of us were hurt. We should be thankful.”
I knew she was right, but I was still seething. I walked her up the stairs and into the house, and we called a cab to take her family back to their hotel.
“Sorry, guys. I guess we’ll have to paint the baby’s room tomorrow.”
As is the case in most home invasions, I felt violated. Not because the asshole burglars had made off with our shit. And not because they poured the contents of our underwear drawers onto the floor while trying to find whatever treasures may have been hidden inside. No. I felt violated because the burglars had entered the house through my future baby’s bedroom. I was scared and angry just thinking about what would have happened