"Items of Value" by Emily Lu Wang
We returned to a cold house.
In the entryway, a whip of winter chill snaked around our ankles. I hung back. An eerie and faraway feeling descended upon me, like I was both a horror-film ingénue and her wide-eyed audience. Chris searched for the offending window. He stopped. I snapped into my body.
The side door, he said, pointing behind him. It’s been forced open.
I thought it was jammed. Didn’t someone break it at our housewarming last summer?
Well, that’s probably why it had to be forced open.
I followed him to the side of the house. A panel had been shunted off its tracks. I wanted to close the door to keep out the cold, but that was impossible. The door used to be jammed shut, and now it was jammed open. In any case, we needed to call the police before we could touch it. I shivered.
What was missing?
When the policemen arrived, they didn’t kick off their shoes. Chris noticed my stares at their salt-stained boots. Don’t watch them walk on the rug, I reproached myself.
We padded through the rooms of our house. In hushed voices—as if the burglar might still be there—we took stock of anomalies. Our jar of olives in the fridge was subtly depleted. We might have been missing a bottle or two of good wine, or maybe we had drunk it and forgotten. The burglar, as far as we could tell, committed only two errors of negligence. First, he left a mug containing a steeped tea bag in the sink. And second, there was a small vacancy in one of our bookshelves that caused the remaining volumes to slant around the absence. I stopped myself from straightening up the shelf, the crime scene. We took pride in neatness, in never needing to apologize to visitors for the mess; the countertops always glassy-clean, the corners always dustless.
I told the policemen we had been gone for a little over a week. The one in charge grimaced. That’s too wide of a time frame. It’ll be hard, he said.
We were in Portugal, I said apologetically.
You packed light for a week. He gestured towards our luggage, slumped by the front door.
We make a point of fitting everything into carry-ons for the convenience, I told him. Only now I could no longer remember what convenience justified. How could I do without my ordinary creature comforts: a plush robe, a thick and difficult novel to page through, my drawer full of skincare potions? For the sake of convenience, I did without a spare jacket, desperately needed in the evenings in Ponta Delgada. Instead, I borrowed Chris’s sweaters, which he offered generously once, following a good dinner, and resentfully thereafter.
Another officer told us to make a full list of everything missing. Olives, the book, peppermint tea. Wine, maybe. Both of us hoped, in a confused way, that the list would grow to a respectable length before the police left.
What normally goes missing?
The police didn’t seem to understand this question. What normally goes missing, they repeated back to us. Yes, we said. What gets stolen? What do robbers like? Valuables, they said slowly, like we might not comprehend. Cash, jewelry, electronics. Passports, sometimes. Prescription drugs.
Valuables. We stood in our living room. Certainly some of our belongings were valuable—the couch, a mid-century modern three-seater, had set us back an indefensible amount—but, of course, too large to move unless the burglar had showed up with a U-Haul. There was the woven rug, its apparent singularity justifying the exorbitant price. And our stacking bowls, intentionally kept empty owing to the fragile gold plating; they were never meant to contain anything.
I entered the office, which we had the idea of turning into a nursery. For now, it was still an office. In Portugal, one of us, then the other, had brought up kids. This was our favorite conversation topic when we were already irritated and required a vehicle for further disagreement. We liked them in the abstract but, to Chris and I, they reflected different ideals, and we exaggerated these differences during disagreements, then diminished them once our moods were restored. We had individually crafted such detailed opinions on the consummate family that the gaps between our visions grated: Chris liked conscientious children; I preferred little imps. He was a petty tyrant; I was naïve. And so on. What concerned us, though we would never say it aloud, was the possibility that the other would slip into the role of parent easily, and that we would be the one vilified. Our fights were rehearsals, testing how much moral ground we were willing to cede, how insidiously we could attack the other. And then the ocean water was too cold to swim comfortably, and we missed our train from Algarve to Lisbon, so by the time we landed back in Newark, whatever small spell our vacation had cast upon us was thoroughly worn and threadbare.
In our bedroom, I closed my eyes and reopened them, as if I were a newborn seeing all of the objects in the room for the very first time. What would I want most of all?
My eyes fell upon the comforter, its eggshell-white cotton temptingly plush. There was a divot in the center, as if our burglar, in the middle of his house visit, had decided to lie down and rest his eyes for a minute.
The men continued to stomp around the hallways. Someone dusted for fingerprints on the door handles. Another officer yelped upon noticing a suspicious boot print outside the front door. A breakthrough.
I wanted to lie down, too.
During my first job in New York, I would walk the nine streets and ten avenues from the office in Chelsea to my cramped studio. I remember those Greenwich Village brownstones on 12th Street, how bloated with longing I felt, peering inside. Their interiors gleamed with good care. I wanted the grand piano in the living room; I wanted the chandeliers, the bookcases, the vases of peonies. I wanted their entire lives.
Their working theory of the crime: someone had broken in through the side door, fixed himself a cup of tea, sat in the living room armchair, tucked a book beneath his arm (though even this, they said, was dubious if we couldn’t name the missing title), and exited out front. Hence the boot print. The ghost of a joke lingered.
How did our burglar escape?
Through the front door.
This could’ve been ours to share, if either of us had a sense of humor. I would misplace the good knife and ask, Do you know where it went? And Chris would say, Maybe our burglar stole it. Or Chris would surprise me with a small love token and say, Look what our burglar brought back. Our burglar would become a family pet, like a cat who, on occasion, brushes against our shins to remind us of affection.
That night, we climbed into bed separately. In the dark, my animal instincts could sense his open eyes. You’re awake, so say something to me, I thought. We hadn’t yet spoken about the break-in to each other, hadn’t added it up and counted it out to see what it might come to mean. Eventually, Chris’s breaths evened into sleep. I nestled into the mattress and imagined my body encased in the cleft my burglar left behind.
Years later, during an argument, after my daughter asks me about my first marriage and why it, in her words, went to shit, I recite the rote explanations: fundamental incompatibilities from the very start, scar tissue from wounds of disagreements past. I still find simple accounts seductive, the way they magnetically realign truth to point in a single direction.
My daughter’s eyes fix upon some distant beyond and I realize I’m losing her. So I tell her about the break-in, how I spent nearly six years assembling my life and it took only one missing book and a dirty mug for everything to disintegrate.
Was it that you didn’t feel safe in your home anymore? she asks.
No, not that, I say.
Did it bother you that the burglar didn’t steal anything?
We fall silent. She runs her finger around a ringed water stain. She has too much nervous energy and can’t sit still. I fight the urge to strike her knee and say, Stop fidgeting. She is fourteen; her body is supposed to be her own.
Finally I say, I don’t know what the break-in meant to me at the time, but it was like a stray thread, a thread that, once I tugged upon it, unspooled my entire world and snagged open a portal through which I could escape. It’s the first time I say those words aloud: “portal,” “escape.”
My daughter’s eyes dart about, seizing upon objects in the kitchen. Yesterday’s newspaper, comics and crossword set aside from the rest; a ceramic bowl holding overripe bananas and one perfect honeycrisp. In her mind’s eye, she holds each item in close examination, trying to imagine how they might constitute a world necessitating escape.
I can’t make her understand.
The anecdote knocks and awaits invitation; it won’t force its way in through the side door. How could we ever welcome a burglar with open arms, the bed made, tea brewing, our entire lives offered forth for the taking.
Emily Lu Wang is a fiction writer and law student. Her work has previously appeared in The Harvard Advocate. She is currently at work on her first novel and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
