I Have Never Lived in a Castle

 

I Have Never Lived in a Castle

Non-Fiction

 

 

Rebecca Carroll © 2005

The dark is steadily creeping over the peaks of the pink, turquoise, and green houses to the east. It is gathering in the corners, reaching its long fingers behind the thick evergreen shrubbery that hides the opossums and other creatures who fear the betraying day light. Although the evening mood is pure loveliness, it is time that I draw up the bridge over the moat, go inside and bolt the doors. I must close the heavy drapes over every window and make sure the sentries are posted in their turrets.

*****

It was a fine summer evening, full of lazy promises. My daughter had come by earlier in the evening, and my grandson and I played baseball in the back yard. He is young, so it was one of those hard, light-weight plastic balls with the seams molded in the plastic. He hit a line drive, hitting me square in the left chest. It stunned me for a moment; it even caused me to take a step backward. Then we laughed. A red circle appeared on my chest, and you could barely make out the fake seams of a baseball. Summer fun.

Later, he and my daughter went to the store, and I babysat my three-month old granddaughter. She was fretful, so I took her in the backyard and sat with her there enjoying the late afternoon: neighbors were walking and children were playing, and amidst the subtle, Avon fragrance of the white and lavender crepe myrtles, I could smell a nice steak grilling.

My subdivision is considered a nice one and rests peacefully in a valley town at the foot of the Cumberland Mountains. Only about five years old, it sits almost in the center of town, adjacent to an older neighborhood. The pretty, mostly pastel-colored homes are close together, and every house has at least one porch. My house is open and light with many windows and five sets of French doors. Some houses, such as mine, share driveways. Most of the neighbors are friendly, and we watch out for one another. The lady next door had just moved in, and I didn’t know her very well. Though we are within walking distance of shops, doctors, restaurants, schools, banks, the post office, the neighborhood feels somewhat private, even secluded at times.

On this particular, appealing evening, after my daughter left, I took a walk as I normally do through the older neighborhood. It’s interesting. I look for the houses where I usually see a familiar cat. I avoid Dog Alley, as I have named it, one of the several city sidewalks that connect streets to the elementary schools. The sidewalk runs between the backs of other houses, and it is completely lined with fenced-in dogs who at least sound vicious. Along my route, there are many well kept homes with nice lawns, but there are also shabby houses with beer bottles and diapers strewn around the trash cans, recycling bins always sitting at the street, and overgrown shrubbery protruding onto the sidewalk. There are a few old boxwood, whose fragrance reminds me of a historic home one might tour on vacation. I pass four churches and a school, and through the parking lots and trees, I can see the roof of Wal-mart, just a block away.

It is all very cozy.

I come home from my walk and turn on the sprinkler to the back yard. Right at dark, I return to the back yard to turn the sprinkler off. Inside, I’m in a hurry to complete the crossword so I can finish the book I’m reading, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. By Shirley Jackson, the novel is about two sisters who, after one of them poisoned the rest of the family, live barricaded in their house, afraid of the world. Jackson has a way of turning the ordinary into the macabre. Yes, an enjoyable evening. Settled on the sofa, among the crossword, the book, the Coke and popcorn, the channel surfing, the stack of materials I am preparing for my fall classes, I am quite satisfied with all that I have accomplished on this day.

I hear something directly behind me, at the door.

I turn to look, and the door handle, a lever type, is turning slowly, quietly. My mind flew instantly to a black and white movie where the camera moves from the door knob turning to the scared heroine’s face. Someone is out there, I think. I know the door is bolted, so I get up and turn on the porch light. I then open the other French door (and yes, cautious reader, I know you are thinking I shouldn’t have done that). A man is on my porch. By the time I realize that he is showing me parts of his anatomy that I don’t wish to see, my instincts have taken over. As his hand is pushing on the door, I quickly slam it shut. I manage to get the dead bolt turned as I am thinking I have to call the police. The phone is in my hand, and I think I have only pressed the 9 when the French door directly behind the sofa crashes open. I drop the phone as the man is groping me, and I scream and scream and fight him until he turns and runs. Somewhere in the chaos, the phone is dropped, the Coke is spilled, and I am still screaming. I stop screaming long enough to dial 911 and then continue screaming into the phone at the dispatcher. She stays calm, asking me if he is still there, did he hurt me, and all the other questions she is so proficiently trained to ask.

Meanwhile, my excellent neighbors who live across the street heard me screaming. The police were close and arrive about the same time the neighbors decide it is me screaming. I calm down enough to give my statement and call my son. He calls my daughter, and he and she arrive minutes later in a hysterical heap of emotion, and I tell the story once again.

By now, almost the entire neighborhood has gathered offering wine, Cokes, hugs, a bed for the night, and the kind of support not advertised in a “house for sale.” Amidst the offers, I try to decide what to do for the night. The door is broken, and I know I cannot sleep alone in the house for a few nights.

We stand on the porch discussing the matter–it’s still an exquisite evening out. Suddenly, behind my house in the alley, I see a man who resembles the idiot intruder. My son yells at him, and the man takes off between two houses. My son and the neighbor chase him over into the older neighborhood. I call the police again. They bring dogs and more officers, but the man has vanished.

A pair of detectives arrive with more questions and discover a telling hand and fingerprint on one of the door’s glass. They call for the fingerprint taker, and ask me to come down to the police station to look at photos. My son accompanies me, and they separate us into bleak interrogation rooms. I hand write my statement, thinking about the person who had sat here and used Whiteout to write on the austere oak table: “save the world.”

I look through pages of photos, trying to match the image in my head with those on paper. By about the 100^th photo, they all start blending into a general white male, and the detective and I give up the search. He warns me of the fingerprint mess at home, and my son and I return to my house to retrieve a few necessitiesfor the night. I decide to stay at my sister’s, and I spend an almost sleepless night reliving the end of my safe world.

The aftereffects are varied: a bruise that looks like finger marks, the hoarseness that lasts a week, the fear that engulfs me like a hot flash when there is an unexpected knock at night. I deal with the fear in a practical manner. I purchase a gun, my first. I reinforce the doors with more dead bolts and longer screws to hold the plates. I leave lights on all night, the TV on all day. My daughter suggests I buy a baby monitor, so I can hear what is going on downstairs at night. I soon discover this is a mistake. The monitor picks up every tick of the clock and every creak of the house settling in for the night. I soon turn it off.

Time is the great healer. I think of an adage I heard: “Time heals all wounds; time wounds all heels.” I know this will work for me, and I know I can’t live in fear. I soon stop carrying the gun with me to the mailbox. I begin to sleep better.

The police soon pick up a guy who matches my description except for his age. He confesses. I am relieved but somewhat dismayed that the fingerprint does not match. The police say they are going to charge him anyway–he confessed. The fingerprint wasn’t that great, they try to reassure me. The picture they show me could be him. It might not be him.

In just a couple of weeks, the detectives come back to my house to warn me they have the wrong guy in jail. “He’s still out there,” the detective says. He had tried to break in on some other women in the neighborhood. The detectives set up surveillance. One night, they stop a man riding a bicycle who fits my description of the intruder. It’s two a.m., so they question him. He confesses. I read about it in the paper. As soon as I see the picture, I know it is him.

The long process of court begins, and I soon learn the harsh fact that the system favors the criminal, not the victim. The status of the case depends on his evaluations, his attorney. I know somewhere in the fuzzy logic in my brain, that if I were unjustly accused of some crime, the process would work also for me. I am patient; I function within the system. I wait. He waits, in jail, with a quarter of a million dollar bond hanging over him like a better bolted door.

A few months have passed, and I walk through the neighborhood again. At home, the doors stay bolted, and every unexpected knock is met with apprehension. As I reflect on the event, I think about my lack of fear at the moment I realized someone was on the porch, and then the fear that overtook me like a dip in an icy lake on a hot and humid summer day as he broke through the door. The foremost question in everyone’s mind when they hear of the incident is whether he raped me. He did not, and that fear never entered my mind. My only thought was that he was going to kill me. I do know that the crude instincts of survival took over my reaction at the moment.

The images live in my mind like a slide show: the young police officer looking like a high school boy; the black dust of the fingerprints that settled in my house like a death veil; and the man’s face as he groped my body. The show is accompanied by the sound of my own voice as I realize it is me I hear screaming.

Shirley Jackson’s stories weave disturbing tales of the home. In her fiction, home is not a place we know, and we are quietly thankful our homes are not like those of her stories. One summer evening, I found home much like Jackson’s homes: unprotecting, vulnerable, and certainly not my castle.