Here She Lies

the window: a man. We both screamed and Lexy began to wail again. The man looked frustrated, pressing something flat against the glass: his open wallet. He was showing us his police identification. I noticed his short brown hair, but he had a beard and no double chin — this was not the man I’d seen earlier in the maroon car.
    “Call Detective Lazare,” I told Julie. “Find out if it’s a different guy.”
    She called — it was a different guy; the shift had changed at midnight. So we let him in. He introduced himself as Mack and went directly to the window to inspect it himself, reaching the same conclusion: the magnet was gone.
    “Do me a favor, ladies, and sit tight while I have alook around.” Mack reached under his fleece sweater and pulled out a gun. I hated guns, for everything they represented. I’d had to endure mandatory target practice at the prison, and just seeing one now brought back the bitter smell of singed metal and the sound of a bullet piercing the air, smashing into a distant cardboard figure. But I said nothing. What if someone had slipped into the house and Mack confronted him? I was glad Mack had the gun.
    Julie and I sat at the table while I nursed Lexy, which was the only way to calm her at this point since she was so agitated. Finally she fell asleep in my arms. After a while Mack reappeared to reassure us. “Everything looks okay,” he said. “No one’s here except us chickens.” We thanked him but didn’t laugh; we were exhausted, on edge. “You might want to look around, though. See if anything’s missing.”
    Julie got up and took a quick glance around the kitchen. The TV she kept on the counter was still there, as were our purses, hanging off the same hook right by the front door. In the adjacent dining room I heard her opening drawers before calling out, “Silver’s all here.” Mack and I stayed together in the kitchen, he standing by the door with his hands in his pants pockets, trying not to eye the high-end appliances, and I at the table, holding sleeping Lexy. Julie moved through the house, inspecting for the obvious things a thief might take: electronics, jewelry, hidden cash. Everything was there.
    When my arms began to lose circulation I went upstairs and put Lexy in her crib. I closed and locked the windows, checked the closets and under the bed, thencarried the listening end of the monitor with me back to the kitchen. I set it on a counter, raised the volume to high, put water on to boil for tea and then reached into my purse for one of the packets of artificial sweetener I’d borrowed from a diner in town.
    I found one easily in the mess of stuff at the bottom of my purse. Too easily. My wallet — the bulkiest item I carried and inevitably the obstacle in my searches for lipstick, pens, tissues, cell phone, keys — was not there. But how could that be possible? I dumped the contents of my purse onto the counter and saw that it was true: no wallet.
    “Oh, jeez,” Julie said, watching me. “But nothing was taken from the house. Why would anyone break in here and steal just your wallet? Annie, maybe you lost it again.”
    I was a little famous for that, having mislaid my wallet three times in the past two years, leaving it behind at stores, on my dresser, in my desk at work. Each time it became less a catastrophe and more a tired farce.
    “Check your purse,” I told Julie.
    She did. Everything of hers, including her wallet, was accounted for.
    “I lost my wallet once,” Mack offered. “Badge and everything, gone.” He cringed at the memory of whatever he had suffered as a result.
    “Gatsby’s,” I said, leaning my elbows on the counter, sinking my face into my hands. “I probably left it behind when I bought the sweatshirts.”
    “Probably,” Julie said. “You’ll call them first thing in the morning.”
    “I wonder why they didn’t call me.”
    “Because you don’t have any local ID.” Julie squeezed my shoulders with both her hands, simultaneously relaxing and forgiving me. “You’ve got to put my address and phone number in your wallet. When you get it back, I’ll give you one of my business cards.”
    “Right.” I felt like such an idiot. “I wonder if Bobby got a call.”
    “He would have let you know, A, don’t you think?”
    I nodded. “I guess the store just figured I’d be back.”
    Mack stayed until Detective Lazare arrived, looking freshly dragged from sleep, his cheek bearing the indentation of a wrinkled