The Alarm He Called Paranoid

The button he called paranoid

I need to back up two summers to tell you the next part right.

Two summers ago there was a run of thefts along the county roads out here. Somebody was going down 300 and 275 and Ridge Road in the dark, cutting locks off tool sheds and hitching up unattended trailers and driving off with augers, welders, a four wheeler, a whole flatbed of fence panel from the Hendrys. The sheriff’s office had two deputies for the whole east half of the county and they told us plain that they could not sit on our driveways. So that fall I took the bonus the co op paid me for closing the year clean, twenty seven hundred dollars I could have spent forty ways, and I put in a real system. Cameras on the shed, the side gate, the back door, the drive. A siren mounted under the eave loud enough to wake the Boones three quarters of a mile off. A monitored panel by the kitchen door that dialed a company down in Indianapolis, and, because the volunteer fire department had started a text chain for exactly this kind of trouble, an alert that pushed straight to the Route 300 Watch, forty some phones up and down our road.

Dale laughed at me for a week. He called it my fortress. He called it overkill. He stood in the kitchen the night the installer left and said, “Who do you think is coming for us, Sharon? You paranoid?” He said I had thrown away a truck payment on cameras that would never catch a thing worth catching.

At 5:42 that Tuesday, my cameras were on. The one over the back door had a clean angle on the pool. So did the one on the side gate. Everything in that yard, the water, the chair, the folded clothes, the two of them, was already recording to a company in Indianapolis that Dale could not charm and could not talk out of it later over supper.

And the red button on the panel, the emergency button he called overkill, was six feet from where I stood.

I did not run for it. I walked to the aluminum chair first, and I did the only thing I had decided to do, which was to leave them nothing to put back on in a hurry. I gathered the clothes off the chair the way you fold laundry, slow, one piece at a time, over my forearm. His fire department shirt. His jeans. His belt. His keys, and the truck fob clipped to them. Her shorts. Her top. Her sandals. Her phone, still lit, Wade’s name still stacked up on the glass. I folded all of it against my arm until the damp of it soaked cold through my sleeve.

“Sharon,” Dale said, and his voice had changed. He had figured out I was not going to scream, and that scared him more than screaming would have. “Sharon, what are you doing.”

I stepped to the panel by the kitchen door.

“Marissa, don’t,” he said, and then he caught himself, because that was not my name, that was nobody’s name, and I will wonder for the rest of my life whose it was. He put both wet hands on the pool rim and said, “Sharon. No.”

I pressed the button once.