To Deserve

If you were to step inside Mary’s home, you would think to yourself that she is a person broken. Not that it was disorderly, not that it reeked of non-maintenance, not that there was rotting food and unclean clothes—but there might as well have been. No furniture in Mary’s house looked to be non-store-bought, no carpet made of non-synthetic fibers, no room any less than a perfect square. If you were to step inside Mary’s house, you would be dizzied by how geometrical it felt—every room the inside of a perfect box, edges sharp and defined. Each stair on the steps seemed capable of cutting cloth at its lip. The walls were decorated with paints and textures which seemed to come from an anonymous, clean factory somewhere far away. She couldn’t save herself from occasionally hearing the floorboards creak, a fact which infuriated her, but in all other measures, her house was made as if from a perfect plastic mold.

Mary once read somewhere that her developer had built hundreds of homes across the country with an identical frame and floor plan as this one. But out of all those hundreds of copies, Mary told herself that hers must be the most appealing. She lived in a neighborhood somewhere in the middle of Illinois whose name was decided upon by a marketing company, and somewhere hidden away upon each decorative item in her house, you’d find a serial number.

Mary worked at a health insurance firm and lived alone. She watched TV dramas about police officers while tucked beneath bedsheets she had ordered from a magazine delivered in the mail. Her brother was a police officer in the city, and she worried about him. That added to the thrill of her shows, in a way: that trace of something real. Every morning, she went to a gym whose CEO lived somewhere in Texas—not that she knew that or even knew his face or name. She did Pilates there and bought smoothies with appealing names like Berry Blast.

When she watched her crime shows and grew fearful, she’d remember the shotgun in her safe, given to her by her grandfather when she turned 15. She once read a story online about protests happening in the city, and she took it out just to feel safer. You could see the twisting fibers of a once-growing tree in its wooden frame, smell a liquor on it which her grandfather used to drink, which to this day she isn’t able to identify. He’d sit on a leather recliner called Grandpa’s Chair after Thanksgiving dinner, sipping it as he grumbled curses at the news.

This very house would become the scene of a crime—or, at the least, she called it a crime because it was the exact sort of thing they talked about on the news. Here, there would be a robbery.

Maggie Orlin was a 23-year-old gambling addict who lived in the city. Maggie owed $5,000 to a woman who lived a couple floors above her, a woman who usually wouldn’t demand it back if it wasn’t for the fact her daughter had to stay overnight at the hospital after an unexpected bee sting revealed a serious allergy. Ms. Taylor was now in debt herself and demanded the money back from Maggie.

Maggie once stole from a boy she was dating.

When the fight reached that fragile, unspeakable line of a breakup, she had bravely said, “I can’t date you right now because I’m not a good person. I lie, I steal, I will cheat on you. I will be a good person one day, but I can’t be one now. It’s not worth it to date me, but one day it will be.”

He accused her of throwing herself a pity party and left. This was three weeks before.

But she did mean it. She would be a good person. She would quit and never steal another dollar again. While taking exit 76, turning onto a road that would eventually reach a suburb, she wrung the steering wheel in her hands passionately, as she listened to songs from a playlist she entitled Crying Music.

She couldn’t steal from anyone she knew. Her first step on a long moral path would be doing the risky and more just thing: taking from someone far away instead, someone who could afford it. She was willing to risk her safety—in truth, her very life—to save those who might be most devastatingly hurt by her actions, by this disease she had been given. She thought it a small moral victory, and when the quiet, tinny music played from her phone, banked within the car console’s stained cup holder, she let herself think for a moment with a rage that this boy would miss her and regret the breakup once he saw how much she had changed.

The neighborhood was called Pleasant Prairies, and only a house or two had been constructed along its singular road. The developer seemed to have only recently cleared out the land to make a residential area. Maggie was looking for a place like this—expensive, but where people would be isolated from one another in case this robbery was to end poorly. This was her third time breaking into a place where people lived, but her first time breaking into a house. She didn’t feel guilty about stealing the money, but she confessed that she hated the possibility that she might cause even a single nightmare in another human being.

Oh well, she said to herself. I will be a shocking story for them, told at dinner parties.

She drove around at two in the morning in search of a house in Pleasant Prairies that looked like it didn’t have children within it. Out here where no crimes could ever happen, where no morsel of land is untouched by funding of one kind or another, people park their cars in their driveways, out in the open next to a white garage door. She thought she could tell something about these people within the great houses made of cream-colored wood based on their cars. From her perch parked down the street, she saw a pink punch buggy parked in a driveway with concrete that looked designer-made. The squares of concrete in the driveway had subtle, curved bezels and a smooth texture. Out here, it was still 1991, so she knew this had to be a woman’s car based on its color. If this woman had parked out in the driveway, then certainly any husband would have as well. But no other car was in sight. This, she thought, is how she would pay Ms. Taylor back.

There was a soccer field’s length of earth between this house and the second nearest, bulldozed to make preparations for houses yet to be built so that the grass had died and left a muddy heap stretching in all directions once the smooth grass of the lawn reached an edge. Maggie knew about the people out here. They wouldn’t traverse that mud unless absolutely necessary, even if things did go poorly, and even if they heard anything from that distance.

Before entering the home, she couldn’t resist giving three gentle knocks to the white wood on the outside, just to see if she was right. She felt like a woodpecker or a squirrel.

“How about that,” she whispered. The wood was fake.

She took some electronics, some trinkets, things that seemed expensive but non-sentimental. She carried a backpack that once went with her every day to high school, which now held pink and white decorative cutlery, a painting of a sunflower, a hair dryer that seemed expensive, some door knobs, a signed poster of a movie about Italian gangsters—odds and ends. She would only have about a thousand dollars total at this rate, and her bag was beginning to grow full.

She had three choices. A jewelry box with but two or three diamonds could lightly and quickly put her over the edge—but certainly such a prize rested in the master bedroom, where the owner of the house slept. Her second choice was to leave and steal again from someone else, but her conscience couldn’t cut it.

If you’re serious about quitting, she told herself, this has to be the last time, and this way, only one person will face any consequences.

That left option number three: the car. This would mean stealing the keys which hung on a key rack in the first-floor kitchen, driving the car away to someplace safe, walking back to where she had parked her own car, leaving, then Ubering back to the hidden pink car to bring it someplace where she could sell it for, easily, five-thousand dollars or more. No car alarm would go off, no sentimental thing would be stolen, and Ms. Taylor would no longer be in debt because of Maggie.

She held the key in her hand. The smell of dinner still lingered in the dark air, olive oil and garlic. There in the pitch-black kitchen, she felt, for the first time, perverse. The key was attached to a small, black plastic square that was lukewarm to touch, whose lock button had been smoothed and left paintless by someone else’s finger. A thing like a car key—a thing which this person carried with her in her pocket every day—had too much of another person’s life on it to steal.

~

Mary had often thought about what it would one day feel like to point a gun at another human being. She had, almost as if by accident, seen this moment so many times in her head that, when the fantasy finally came true, she was surprised at how non-glorious it felt to order this intruder to stand absolutely still.

Here was a girl who hadn’t showered in at least a week, with tattoos and piercings and all of these other things Mary had always expected a criminal to have. Held up against her cheek, she smelled the gun in her hands and thought of how proud people would be of her for this. Mary had often imagined—with an embarrassing kind of excitement—that in this moment the criminal would try to run, lunge at her, pull out a gun or a knife, and that she would be forced, tragically, to fire. But Maggie did no such thing. Instead, she tried to explain herself.

“I don’t have a weapon. Please lower it,” Maggie said. “Please. I’ll drop everything and leave. This is the last time I’ll ever try to steal. I don’t need this money for me. Someone I know, their kid got sick, and they couldn’t afford it.”

Mary wondered if she should still fire, since it was legal to do so—she wouldn’t need to feel any guilt—but she had no desire to kill anything. It’s just that she imagined this moment feeling different, and she wondered if firing the gun would fix that. She always imagined that she would be forced to fire, and a harrowing scene would follow as she wept for having taken a life lost. But still, how proud her coworkers would be when they heard, how thrilled her family would be, how wide the smile of her grandfather shining down on her from heaven. But she had always imagined that she, herself, would feel pride too during this moment—that she would be able to feel all the strength and justice she’d wanted to see in the world manifest in the texture of that hair trigger. But she felt no such thing. Something about this intrusion needed to be fixed.

“Drop the bag and turn your pockets inside out,” Mary said.

Maggie complied, petrified. Maggie’s cell phone screen turned on when it hit the floor, dully illuminating the room. This woman pointing a gun at her should be trembling too, flushed with adrenaline and emotion, but she seemed to have the distant and intellectual look of a person solving a puzzle.

Mary was embarrassed—the weight of the gun was beginning to fatigue the muscles in her shoulder. It hurt, and that frustrated her. But she had to keep the criminal still until the police came. She knew that if she lowered her gun to pull out her phone and call 911, this girl would take her chance while the gun was lowered and lunge at her. But she wasn’t strong enough to hold this twenty-pound gun with one hand—and if any injustice did happen, Mary wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

“I have an attic,” Mary said. “With one of those swing-down ladders from the ceiling. It’s at the top of the stairs. You’ll walk up there with me behind you the whole time. Then I’ll close you up there, and then I’ll call the police. You’ll stay up there until they arrive.”

Maggie was in tears but nodded and stayed silent. There was no escape now.

She had always imagined building a relationship with someone she loved during her twenties. She thought about characters in TV shows with lives like the one this woman lived; how they talked about being anxious about letting even one year slip by in which life wasn’t lived to the fullest. She knew a couple people in prisons, but no one close to her, so that when they went, they vanished to Maggie, plucked from the face of the earth as if they were figments of her imagination who never truly existed at all.

Once locked in the attic, she swallowed a horrible thought. Maggie wanted to hate something, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate this woman. Maggie let herself hate her parents, her high school, her boss, but more than anything she wanted to hate this woman and yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Envious and desperate, she couldn’t let herself hate this woman because all the stories she had ever heard told her that she was utterly guilty and deserved this fate.

Mary locked the attic and let her arms rest. She sat crisscrossed on the carpeted ground of the second floor like a child as she stared up at the attic door. And when she looked down at her brother’s contact information on her phone—the policeman—she realized that calling him would feel wrong. The police escorting this girl out of her house, dispassionately delving out justice on her behalf, would feel wrong. The image of this girl somewhere in some jail petrified Mary. The idea that she would wake up every day wondering about where the girl was, what she was doing, eating, what conversations she was having, love she was building, letters writing, lies telling: and Mary would know none of it.

Now, Mary cried. Crisscrossed on the carpet, she shook and put down her phone, ran her hands across her shotgun like she was petting an animal, as the uncertainty weighed heavy against her spine. She didn’t know what this girl was doing up there in her attic, and it terrified her. Mary was a person broken, every muscle of her body seeming to grow rigid and immovable as she looked up at the attic door on the ceiling. Face red, she could hardly remember to breathe.

Mary looked up the average sentence for a home burglary. Depending, it could be anywhere between one year and thirty.

~

At first, Mary said she would only keep this girl up in her attic for as long as it would take for her to find an answer that felt right. She read blog posts about people who were victims of home invasion like her, about how they felt when the criminal was caught and locked away. She would consider calling her brother every day, but upon each attempt, a brief and sharp pain that lasted no more than a handful of seconds prevented her from making the call. Mary spent hours upon hours of hard labor preparing to transform the attic with Maggie inside, and despite how much energy was expended in keeping her, none of the energy stung sharply like calling the police would.

It first started the day after the burglary, when Maggie saw a piece of notebook paper wiggle its way between the attic door’s cracks. In letters which looped and swirled.

Do you have any dietary restrictions?

Maggie was starved. She had fallen asleep in the attic expecting the police to wake her up. In their place, she received this message.

The thought was too horrible. It had to be that the police were delayed. It had to be that not as much time had passed as Maggie had thought. It had to be something else.

Later that day, Mary came up with the gun and put Maggie in handcuffs. Maggie watched as Mary, first, brought up an elegant plate of food—which Maggie ate. Next, a small bed that could be wiggled through the attic’s door piece-by-piece. Then a television, for entertainment. She brought up plants to filter the air, lighting to make the space sparkle, books, a carpet, an air freshener, toiletries and sanitation products, a large litter box, a notebook, packs and packs of bottled water, shampoo, soap, and conditioner, sound-proofing tiles, art supplies, and a chair. By the end of it, after a process of multiple weeks of renovations, the room was truly beautiful: walls painted, well-decorated, and adorned with as many pass-times as could be included, given that they wouldn’t make it possible for Maggie to escape. After a distraught first week in which Maggie lived in decent but less-than-ideal conditions—a necessary road bump which nevertheless upset Mary—Maggie’s room looked, in one word, expensive. Maggie remained bound when Mary was transforming the attic, but before and after this, Maggie moved as she pleased. Whenever Mary entered the attic to perform maintenance, she would bring her grandfather’s shotgun.

Mary never interacted with Maggie. She was left to her own devices. The two never made contact with one another, spoke, exchanged pleasantries, nor did they discuss their lives. After a month, Mary realized that, although she had asked for Maggie’s name, Mary had never shared her own. She thought that this wasn’t something to fret over.

Mary felt so safe once Maggie was secured in her attic, aware via the creaking of the ceiling above of every movement she made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was closer to perfect than calling her brother.

Even so, although she found the arrangement just, Mary didn’t find it fair that Maggie couldn’t speak to her family or loved ones, if she had such things. As such, after a month, Mary spoke with Maggie for the first time since her capture.

“I’ve come up with a system,” Mary said, annunciating. “No, please don’t try to speak to me. Just let me explain. Please let me explain. Please don’t try to speak to me. Maggie, you will want to hear what I have to say. Yes. I wanted to tell you that I’ve come up with a system. It isn’t fair that you’re unable to communicate with the outside world. If you write messages on this notebook paper, I’ll review them to ensure they’re appropriate, and send them to wherever you’d like. I’ve chosen the return address, and it isn’t this residence, of course, but I’ll check that return address in case you get any messages in the mail. I’m sorry for not allowing you to make contact with the outside world—that was unfair of me.”

Maggie felt ill at the suggestion. To write such a letter would feel like submitting to this woman’s depravity. If it truly did upset Mary that she wasn’t able to communicate with the outside world, perhaps she could refuse to write any letters in protest.

Maggie came up with a plan. She would write letters detailing the genuine and chasmic pain she felt as a result of being separated from those she loved, but she would fail to include an address for it to be sent off to. Mary might read it and somehow remember what she was doing to Maggie.

Mary prepared the first couple of paragraphs of the letter, detailing a false story about running away to a commune somewhere in rural Nebraska. Mary was preparing Maggie’s dinner upon a speckled, black-granite countertop as she read the letter. She purchased organic food and experimented with new recipes weekly. As opposed to a passive chore, she saw preparing Maggie’s meals as an activity that required utter concentration and craftsmanship. Plates would be decorated, spices measured, broths sampled, meats temperature-checked, fruits and vegetables locally sourced, menus designed with care; and calories would never be counted, as Mary was certain that no girl in all of Illinois ate as fully and as well as Maggie.

In the spiced, warm clouds of dinner preparation, there on the granite countertop, Mary sipped broth, stirred a gravy, and licked her fingers in between reading paragraphs of Maggie’s writing.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It’s been a couple of years since we’ve spoken. I wish my apology didn’t have to take this form. I wish I didn’t have to send it under these conditions. I should be saying these words to you, out loud, in our kitchen. You should hear these words and we should make dinner afterward and watch Star Trek together like we did a million years ago together. I wish I could explain more of my situation, but while I’m in it, I know that you reading these words, even if the circumstances are so far from ideal, is better than me having never written them.

Dad, you got addicted. Maybe you still are. And then slowly but surely, I did too, but in a different way. And Mom, you had to live with us and love us. Every day I think about how you never deserved any of this, Mom. You don’t deserve to have a daughter who doesn’t speak to you. You didn’t deserve to live in a house with the two of us. I’ve heard you say a million times how you wanted better for me than what I got. But you deserve someone who tells you: I wanted better for you. I want better for you every day.

Dad, I’ve never had a teacher, coach, or boss talk to me one-on-one if they weren’t telling me how I’m failing at something. I’m so angry at you for everything you did. I don’t even know if you’re sorry, but I’m writing this because the older I get the more I’m realizing that I’m not like Mom. I’m like you. I’ve fought with you so many times in my head. And when I did, I couldn’t admit it to myself, but I knew the parts of you I would fight with—the parts of you I hated the most—are the same parts you passed down to me. I feel awful for everything I’ve done, and if I’m really like you, you do too. The older I get the more I realize that everyone around you would rather see you die than fail, because you could be replaced, but a failure can’t be undone. You weren’t measured by who you were but by your distance from failure. And then you failed. I know it might be hard to believe, but I know a shred of how awful that feels. I need forgiveness so badly. So please let me tell you: no matter what happens, I forgive you.

We didn’t deserve this. We don’t deserve this. We deserved to talk to one another every day. We deserved to build a life together. We deserved to go out to dinners together, talk about who I’m dating, invite friends over during Thanksgiving. Neither of you deserved this. I will always miss you.

I love you, Maggie.

Mary had to read the letter over to ensure it was safe to send, but she was not inhuman. She felt feelings, which were real, when she read it. She served Maggie dinner that day, and for the second time, she spoke to her. Maggie hadn’t included a delivery address, and if it wasn’t for that, Mary wouldn’t have opened her mouth as she set the steaming plate down with one hand, shotgun in the other.

Mary said, “That was a nice note. Put the delivery address on it, and I’ll send it out.”

This time, as she closed the attic door, more softly, behind her, Mary heard the voice of a child screaming, as if from another world, I don’t deserve this. Maggie demanded the voice to be quiet, and silence did follow, but afterward, she was petrified by a new uncertainty. She wasn’t sure if the sound of that voice truly came from the attic.

~

One day, Mary received a call from her brother Mike, the police officer. He asked if he could stop by her house for dinner.

“No,” Mary said, “I’d like to go out to eat tonight. It’s been too long. I’d like to see you too, but we should go out to eat elsewhere.”

“Last year we would talk to one another almost every day. I miss that.”

“I miss it too.”

“And your cooking is second to none, Mary. It’s been ages since I’ve visited. I like to see where you’re living, how things are going—and all.”

“I have no groceries,” she said. “It might be a hassle to prepare it all.”

“I’ll just order whatever you need ahead of time, that’s no worry.”

She thought that it was so silly that if she were to be caught, she would go to jail. But then again, her brother was always so much like Mary herself. Maybe he would understand.

“Okay,” Mary said. “Sure, stop by. How about this, I’ll go grab groceries now, and then I’ll pick you up from the jail on my way back. You have to go back there tonight, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll pick you up, we’ll have dinner, and then I’ll drop you back off at the jail.”

“Perfect,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Into the jail?”

“I’ve never seen where you work before,” Mary said. “I visited a jail once when I was a child. It’s been ages. I like to see where you’re working.”

“Sure, come take a peek,” he said. “It’s interesting.”

~

She was escorted in by her brother and another officer. She touched her hands to the bulletproof glass of Mike’s office, entranced by her view of the jail. The glass was warm and plasticky. As Mike changed into civilian clothing, stored away his gun, hung up his baton, took off his badge, Mary gazed at the rows and rows of identical cells. She looked at a four-story, cavernous expanse of white bars and concrete floors, patrolled by watchful guardians that looked to her like angels circling the mouth of the inferno. She wanted to hold a baton. She wanted to orbit the cages, like these angels circling these halls of just consequence. She didn’t know who among them, but she knew that someone in her field of view, someone in one of these cells, had certainly broken into a home before. She felt something perfect, blissful, the closest she’s ever felt to being in love, when she realized that everyone in here deserves this. She loved this place, just like her brother.