“Mrs. Webb, is that your brother in law?” Chief Reilly asked, his voice flat as a board. On the small screen of his laptop, in the cold glow of a streetlight, the face of the man on the ladder was easy to read. It was Curtis Pruitt, the husband of my sister, in his gray work jacket, with the folded towel in his hands and a scrape across the knuckles that I had noticed at the hospital. My throat closed. I could not say the word. I nodded once, and Chief Reilly closed the laptop gently, the way you close the eyes of someone who has seen enough.
The next recording was worse. At 10:58 p.m., a second figure stood at the foot of the ladder, in a pink raincoat I had given my sister two Christmases ago. She held the ladder steady with both hands. She looked up at the window above the furnace vent, and I watched her say something to her husband, and he laughed. Neither of them looked toward the hallway. Dad had mounted the camera high, behind the curtain rod, and they never imagined that an old man in a brown cardigan had been recording the very stretch of wall they were attacking.
Gail was arrested in the hospital hallway twenty minutes later. She was holding a cup of coffee and a pamphlet about grief counseling. Curtis was taken in the parking lot, with the second towel still on the seat of his truck. I stood behind the glass doors with Chief Reilly and watched my sister put her hands behind her back. She turned and found my face through the glass. For a moment she looked like a little girl in a Halloween costume who has just been told the candy was not hers. Then they put her in the car.
A father who guards his home with a small camera and a large heart is never really asleep.
Mom and Dad survived. I want to say that plainly, because the days that followed were long enough to make me doubt it. The doctors kept them both in the hospital for nine days, with oxygen and fluids and a rotating group of nurses who learned to call Dad “Mister Earl.” Mom woke first. When I came into her room on the third morning, she turned her head on the pillow and looked at me with eyes that were clear and wet and very much her own. “Janice,” she whispered. “Is the soup done?” I laughed until I had to hold the bed rail.
Dad took longer. He was eighty six, and the gas had been hard on his heart. On the sixth day, the cardiologist came in with a clipboard and a grave face, and I braced myself. “Mr. Webb,” he said, “you have the lungs of a man twenty years younger.” Dad opened one eye. “I walked to work for forty one years,” he said. “Every day. Rain or snow.” “Well,” said the doctor, “it paid off.” Then my father, who had nearly died six days earlier, smiled at the ceiling and said, “And my security system paid off too.”
Gail and Curtis were charged with attempted murder, and they were convicted in the winter by a jury that deliberated for less than a day. Curtis received twenty two years. Gail received eighteen. It came out at the trial that the two had mortgaged their own house twice and borrowed from a lender who did not forgive debts. The house of my parents, worth two hundred twenty thousand dollars, was their plan to wipe it all away, and I was supposed to be the one who took the blame. They had planned it for months.
I did not go to the sentencing. I sat in the car outside the courthouse with the heater running and a thermos of coffee, and I thought about my sister at five years old, in a yellow bathing suit at the municipal pool, clinging to my neck. I thought about how I had once taught her to ride a bicycle in the alley behind our house, running beside her with one hand on the seat. I had let go, and she had pedaled away from me, and I had cheered. I will never understand where that girl went.
When Mom and Dad came home, I moved into the spare bedroom. I did not ask. I carried a suitcase through the front door and said, “I am staying until I am sure.” Dad did not argue. He had already had the furnace replaced, and an alarm installed that sounds on every floor, and a second carbon monoxide detector put in the hall. The old vent was sealed with a plate of stainless steel. He showed it to me with the pride of a man who had won a war. “Nobody is stuffing a towel in that,” he said.
In March, the Rockford fire department invited Dad to a banquet. Chief Reilly stood at the lectern and told the story of a small camera in an upstairs hallway, and the crowd of firefighters in their dress blues turned in their chairs to look at an old man in a brown suit who sat at table four with his wife. When the chief presented the plaque, Dad rose slowly with his cane. “I do not know what to say,” he said. “I was only trying to keep an eye on the neighborhood.” The room stood, and Mom cried into her napkin, and I stood with them.
On Wednesday nights, I still go over for supper, and I still leave by nine. But now I stay till the dishes are done, and sometimes I stay all night. Dad sits in his recliner and tells me about the new camera he bought, and Mom pretends to complain. The old one is mounted on the wall of the kitchen, above the door, in a little frame he made himself. On the wood he burned two words with a hot nail: STILL WATCHING. I tell him it is a very good name for a security system, and he says it is also a good name for a family.