That's the word other people put upon her anyway. She could not quite bring the word upon herself.
The bus driver had told her he'd tell her where she should get off. Sure enough, he kept his word. He turned around and said, "This is it, hon," and pulled up to a dark corner. She took a moment to note how he'd called her "hon." Actually, it made her feel good. She knew it was foolish. To put too much on somebody's calling her an affectionate name. But it made her feel good anyway.
She nodded her thanks and got off the bus, standing on the corner until it pulled away in an invisible cloud of diesel fuel.
She looked around. She felt as if she'd just been dropped off at the last outpost of civilization. Despite all the big houses, she still felt isolated. Hunching down into her coat, she crossed the street and began looking for the address that was on the wallet card.
It took her nearly twenty minutes to find it. The place was large, angular, and set in a copse of elm trees up on a shelf of a hill. The place was also dark. Completely. It stood out in contrast to all the well-lighted homes on either side of it.
The first thing she did was check out the garage. She walked along the snow-encrusted side of the attached garage and looked to see if there were any cars. Pressing her nose up to the window, she peered inside. Empty. Without knowing why, she felt relief. She also felt cold. The temperature had to be nearing zero. Her nostrils felt glued to the bone in her nose. Her cheeks were already numb.
Having no skills whatsoever as a burglar (actually, a few months back, there'd been a street kid who had a crush on her who'd wanted to teach her about such things), she decided the only thing she could try was smashing a window in the back and climbing inside. She might have no skills as a burglar, but she had the appetites. Maybe the guy had stuff worth stealing. Portable stuff that could be easdy sold in pawnshops.
Pale moonlight gave the snow on the hill in back an eerie flat gold colour. She could see occasional dog turds and yellow snow. Either the guy had a dog, or neighbourhood dogs had elected his yard the communal toilet. Dogs scared her. She looked with new fear at the dark windows facing her on the back of the house. What if she got in all right, only to be jumped on and tom about by some pit bull lying in wait? She'd seen a 60 Minutes report on pit bulls that had made her forever petrified of the animals.
She stood there for a time saying an odd prayer or two for good luck and then realized that this was about the worst thing you could do-ask God to help you become a good thief.
She went up to a window to the right of the door, made a fist of her gloved hand, and then smashed her hand through the glass.
She held her breath, waiting for a burglar alarm to sound. She heard a car hissing by on the street out front, a big aeroplane lost somewhere in the rolling silver clouds above, a lonely dog yipping and yapping in the far distance, and an even more distant train roaring through the white mid-western night.
But she did not hear a pit bull, and she did not hear a burglar alarm.
Even though she knew she was being sacnlegious, she offered a silent prayer of thanks.
Then she set about trying to get into the house.
The first thing she realized was that she was too short to reach the hook inside that locked the window. She had to go into the oil-smelling garage and get a plastic milk case and bring it back to the window and stand on it to give herself enough height. The second thing she realized was that she had to break yet another window and fiddle with yet another hook to actually get inside. So, she had to go through all the terror again-waiting for the sound of a pit bull, waiting for the sound of an alarm.
In all it took her seventeen minutes to get inside. She stood in a large and largely empty dining room. The whole place-from what she could see from there-sort of looked like that… curiously empty. Oh, everything looked nice and expensive, what there was of it, but it appeared that the guy didn't have the money (or something) to finish the job of furnishing the place.
Still leery of a pit bull springing on her from nowhere, she set about searching the house. Once, just as she was standing in the centre of the living room, headlights splashed through the curtains and across the wall. She stopped, frozen, heart pounding, a glaze of sweat covering most of her body.
The man was home.
What was she going to do?
But then, miraculously, the headlights withdrew, a transmission whined in reverse, and the car was going back down the street.
Just turning around. Nothing more.
Her next stop was the basement. She'd found a flashlight sitting on a kitchen counter, and she used it then, easing her way down the basement stairs. A furnace blasted on when she got about halfway down, startling her. The flashlight picked out a large family room that, like the upstairs, gave the impression of crying out for furniture. Instead of curtains, for instance, the windows were covered with sheets and pillow cases.
In other parts of the basement she found a bathroom complete with shower, a formidable workshop area, and a large freezer.
For some reason she was curious about the freezer and was ready to open it when the phone started ringing upstairs. Suddenly she heard a male voice filling the darkness above her. An answering machine telling people that he wasn't home. She let her hands slide from the lid of the freezer. She decided to go back upstairs, to the bedrooms. Most people kept cash on hand somewhere in the house. Thus far she hadn't found any, true, but the bedrooms were probably a more likely place to hide cash anyway.
On her way through the living room to the staircase, she thought again of sitcom families. Just a little more furniture, and this place would be a palace. How nice it would be to live there instead of a cramped, five-room farmhouse, where every night she'd had to listen to… She thought of her older sister Janice. How Janice had looked that last time in the hospital.
But there was no time for that. She wanted to find some cash… She went up the stairs.
There were three bedrooms on the upper floor. In the beam of the flashlight, the upstairs looked even more desolate than the rooms downstairs. In one she found clothes that still were packed in boxes, along with odds and ends such as hairbrushes and cuff links and shoe trees. In another, she found boxes of books. Here was a man who obviously liked to read. She pulled up one of the books and looked at it, an expensive hardcover entitled The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She had seen the movie version of this with Robert Redford and hadn't liked it.
In the third bedroom she found a double bed askew with twisted sheets and covers. The electric blanket was still on, its controls still glowing orange in the darkness. The windows were rimmed with frost; she wanted to climb into the bed and get under the covers and luxuriate in long hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In a four-drawer dresser in the west corner of the bedroom she found a small red box that had once contained chequebooks. It now contained cash. More than two hundred dollars. She put the money in her coat pocket and started downstairs.
When she got halfway down, the phone rang again. The sounds were loud, almost eerie, in the big, dark, empty house.
She heard the man's voice say he wasn't home but would call back as soon as possible, and then she heard another voice, the live one, describe how badly he wanted to talk to the man who lived there. The caller said that he knew the man could take his messages off this machine from a long ways away, so would the man please come over to the caller's house ASAP. Then the caller hung up.
Standing in the pooled shadows at the bottom of the stairs, streetlight and frost turning the white curtains to silver, Denise searched her mind for what ASAP meant. Then she remembered; it was an expression her mother had used frequently when Denise was younger. You clean that room up ASAP, young lady; you get your bike into the bam where it won't be rained on, and I mean ASAP.